A Texas jury on Wednesday acquitted a former Uvalde school police officer on 29 counts of child endangerment after he remained outside Robb Elementary School instead of immediately confronting the gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers in their classrooms in 2022.
The verdict is a major setback for prosecutors, who portrayed the case against Adrian Gonzales as a way to deliver justice and accountability for one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
Instead, jurors appeared to agree with Gonzales’s lawyers, who described him as unfairly singled out among the hundreds of law enforcement officers who arrived on the scene — a response that investigators said was marked by significant communication failures and poor decision-making.
Had he been convicted, the 52-year-old Gonzales faced up to two years in prison.
The former officer of the six-member Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department was one of the first law enforcement personnel to respond on that sunny May day, when a teenage shooter walked into Robb Elementary through an unlocked door and opened fire inside two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms.
Nearly 400 officers ultimately converged on the school but did not breach the classroom where the gunman was located until more than an hour after he entered the building.
Prosecutors argued that Gonzales bore particular responsibility for the tragedy. They focused on his initial encounter with a frantic woman fleeing the school, who pointed toward the general location of the shooter as gunfire was heard inside, and his subsequent decision not to immediately rush in, which they said went against his active-shooter training.
However, defense lawyers noted that four other officers arrived at almost the same time and also did not enter the school right away to confront the gunman. Unlike Gonzales, three of them were in a position to see the assailant, his lawyers said. One thought he spotted the shooter outside the school and asked for permission to fire, his superior officer testified.
Emotions ran high during the three-week trial, which featured wrenching testimony from teachers who survived the shooting and parents whose children were among the murdered and wounded.
The prosecution is “trying to hijack your emotion to circumvent your reason,” defense attorney Nico LaHood told jurors. Gonzales was “easy pickings,” he said. “The man at the bottom of the totem pole.”
Both of Gonzales’s lawyers repeatedly acknowledged the grief of families and the community. “There’s nothing that’s going to bring these kids back,” Jason Goss said during closing arguments Wednesday. “Nothing is ever going to solve that pain.”
But, he added, “You do not honor their memory by doing an injustice in their name.”
Gonzales is one of two former officers to be charged in connection with the mass killing. Pete Arredondo, the former chief of Uvalde’s school district police, is also set to stand trial on charges of child endangerment. Arredondo has pleaded not guilty.
Wednesday’s verdict marks the second time that a jury has declined to convict a school police officer for failing to stop a school shooting. In 2023, Scot Peterson, a sheriff’s deputy who worked as a security officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was acquitted of similar charges. Five years earlier, a gunman had killed 17 students, teachers and staff members at the school.
Gonzales’s trial took place in Corpus Christi, more than 200 miles from Uvalde, after the defense argued that a change of venue was necessary to obtain an impartial verdict. Jurors began deliberating early afternoon Wednesday.
Gonzales, in a blue suit and a tie patterned with crosses, wept and hugged one of his lawyers after the verdict was read. He had not testified in his own defense, but prosecutors played an hour-long video, recorded not long after the shooting, in which he recounted his actions at the school.
Christina Mitchell, the district attorney for Uvalde County, had told jurors that returning a guilty verdict would send a message to all law enforcement officers about their duties to members of the public and children in particular.
The children inside Robb Elementary had followed their lockdown training, staying quiet and hidden, she said, while Gonzales did not run to confront the shooter, as his training suggested.
“We’re not going to continue to teach children to rehearse their own death and not hold [officers] to the training that’s mandated by the law,” Mitchell said. “We cannot let 19 children die in vain.”
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