As the man armed with a long rifle stalked Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, before the mass shooting in 2022, a former teacher remembered arming herself with scissors while watching her students grab them, too.
“We came up with a plan. Do what we have to do. Defend. They all got theirs,” she said, referring to pairs of safety scissors.
The former third-grade teacher, Stephanie Hale, recounted the harrowing moment during the trial of the first of two officers charged with negligence. Adrian Gonzales, who prosecutors said was the first officer to arrive at the scene and learn the whereabouts of the gunman moments before the assailant entered the school. Mr. Gonzales is facing 29 counts of abandoning and endangering children. His lawyers argued that he did the best he could with the information he was given at the time.
Ms. Hale’s testimony played out as expected, causing lawyers and families of the victims in the Corpus Christi courtroom to become emotional. But what she said next threw the opening days of the much anticipated trial — the first criminal trial connected with the massacre — into legal chaos that threatened to derail the proceedings at one point.
Struggling at times to speak, Ms. Hale stunned the room when she told the jury she saw the long-haired gunman armed with a rifle, wearing all black, outside the campus’s south end, near the vicinity where Mr. Gonzales was calculating his next move after responding to the scene.
“The things you’re testifying to here today are not the things that you said to the Ranger at the time. Did you know that?” asked Jason Goss, a lawyer for the defense, referring to a Texas Ranger investigator, part of the state police.
The testimony raised concerns among Mr. Gonzales’s defense team. Mr. Goss argued that Ms. Hale had discussed seeing the gunman with investigators for the Uvalde District Attorney’s office but that prosecutors failed to relay those details as required by law.
That issue led to tense courtroom moments during the first days of testimony, with defense lawyers asking for a mistrial and the judge overseeing the case, Sid Harle, calling the prosecution’s omission unintentional but “negligent.”
Judge Harle denied the defense’s motion for a mistrial on Wednesday, but on Thursday told the jury to disregard Ms. Hale’s testimony altogether.
“Don’t speculate about it,” Judge Harle told the jury.
Mr. Goss and Nico LaHood, another lawyer for the defense, said Ms. Hale discussed seeing the gunman with prosecutors in December. Her testimony this week also differed from what she told investigators days after the tragedy as well, the defense team said.
“This is the first time that I’m hearing of this in a trial of this magnitude,” Mr. Goss said. “And so if she did report these things to the prosecution, we were entitled to that to prepare for this. This is a trial by ambush.”
The prosecution’s case hinges on Mr. Gonzales’s exact location in those first few minutes as the gunman gained access to the school and began shooting.
Ms. Hale’s revelation during testimony Tuesday afternoon prompted a pause to the proceedings, with defense lawyers arguing that the jury could be tainted by the new information. Outside the presence of the jury, Christina Mitchell, the Uvalde district attorney, tried to dismiss the defense’s concerns under oath, saying she was too busy with two jobs.
“You’re getting very nitpicky,” Ms. Mitchell said during her questioning by defense lawyers and the judge. “Let me tell you something. When we were prepping these witnesses, I was running a law office, so I was in and out of interviews. ‘Oh, my God’ — it wasn’t that type of reaction for me.”
During the arguments Tuesday, Judge Harle appeared visibly frustrated.
Withholding evidence could be considered a serious court breach known as a Brady violation, named after a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Some family members of the victims said they were disappointed by the district attorney’s presentation of the case so far.
“If there was one word that I could say about their team, it’s incompetent,” said Manuel Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece, Jacklyn Cazares, died in the massacre. “It’s hard to remain positive. It really is.”
“They had three-plus years to get their act together, to work with the witnesses, to get them to where we’re at today. Just learning what we learned yesterday, it caught us again by surprise,” he told reporters outside the courtroom on Wednesday.
The district attorney has asked the parents of the victims and survivors not to speak to the media as the trial proceeds.
Days shy of his 18th birthday in May 2022, the gunman, Salvador Ramos, purchased two AR-15-style rifles and more than 1,700 rounds of 5.56 millimeter hollow-point bullets. Then on May 24 at around 11:30 a.m., Mr. Ramos made his way to Robb Elementary after shooting his grandmother in the face. She survived.
At the school, he unleashed a barrage of gunfire in two connected fourth-grade classrooms, where some of the victims repeatedly called 911 for help before dying.
The school mass shooting drew nationwide outrage after it was revealed that some 77 minutes elapsed before a tactical team, led by federal Border Patrol agents, confronted and killed the gunman. Overall, 19 students and two teachers were killed and several others were injured.
While investigators from a number of state and federal agencies have said that more than 370 officers were involved in the police response that day, most of them remained outside Robb Elementary.
Only two officers have been charged, while others have been fired or left their jobs.
Pete Arredondo, the former school district police chief, who was identified by several officials as what was considered the incident commander on scene, is expected to face trial later this year. He has denied that he played that role and has pleaded not guilty.
Testimony began Tuesday with Bill Turner, a special prosecutor hired for the case, telling the jury in his opening statements that Mr. Gonzales was the first to respond to reports of an incident at the school but failed to stop or delay the gunman even after Mr. Gonzales was made aware of his location and after he had been trained for such a moment.
“He was trained to go to the corner of a building and distract, delay, and impede the gunman while help is arriving. So why are we here?” Mr. Turner told the jury.
“When a child is in danger and calls 911, we have the right to expect a response.”
Family members of the victims wiped tears and some embraced one another while listening to their children’s names being called out during a reading of the indictment. Some also sobbed listening to audio of the first 911 calls of shots fired near the school that day.
Mr. LaHood, the lawyer for the defense, said that Mr. Gonzales took the call, drove to the school, called for backup and helped evacuate children in other classrooms, Mr. LaHood said.
“The government wants to make it seem like he just sat there,” Mr. LaHood said. “You know, he didn’t just sit there. He did what he could with what he knew at the time. And this was sort of a dynamic situation.”
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.
The post Former Uvalde Teacher’s Testimony Throws a Trial Into Chaos appeared first on New York Times.
