A Texas jury on Wednesday acquitted a former police officer of felony child endangerment charges stemming from his role in a botched law enforcement response to the 2022 Uvalda school shooting that killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers.
Adrian Gonzales, 52, who was on the Uvalde School District Police Department, faced 29 felony counts of child endangerment for what prosecutors say was his failure to stop the gunman in the first minutes of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
Gonzales buried his head in his hands as his lawyers patted him on the back after the verdict was read. Parents and siblings of the victims appeared stunned by the decision, some wiping away tears while others stared blankly.
A Corpus Christi jury deliberated for more than seven hours before reaching its verdict of not guilty on all 29 counts, each carrying up to two years in prison.
The trial was a rare case in which a US police officer was charged with endangering life by failing to stop a crime.
Defense attorney Jason Goss told jurors that prosecutors wanted to make Gonzales a scapegoat for all the officers’ mistakes in the shooting.
“They decided they had to pay for the pain of that day, and that’s not right,” Goss said in closing arguments.
Gonzales was among the first of more than 400 police officers to arrive at Robb Elementary School in Uvalda on May 24, 2022. Police waited 77 minutes before entering the classroom where the gunman was holed up.
The shooter, a former student at the school, was eventually shot and killed by other officers.
Gonzales was accused of failing to confront the shooter after he arrived at Robb Elementary School in his patrol car in response to a report of an active shooter.
“You can’t stand by and let this happen,” special prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during closing arguments.
Gonzales said he did not see the shooter and denied freezing during the first chaotic minutes of the incident when the shooter was outside the school.
The nearly three-week trial was held in Corpus Christi, about 175 miles (282 km) southeast of Uvalde, after the defense argued that Gonzales could not get a fair trial in the town of about 16,000 in the Texas Hill Country.
A state and federal investigation into the shooting found that officers left the 18-year-old gunman alone in a classroom with children while they considered how to confront him.
By the time a tactical team led by Border Patrol officers swooped in, the death toll had reached its worst ever in a country notorious for college shootings.
While debate has raged between proponents of gun control measures and those who argue that such controls violate the constitutional right to bear arms, few restrictions on firearms remain in the US compared to other industrialized nations.
Former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks at the 2024 presentation of the federal report on Uvalda that lives would have been saved if police had immediately confronted the shooter.
