By Brad Brooks
Jan 6 (Reuters) – The trial of one of the first police officers on the scene of the 2022 attack at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 students and two teachers opened on Tuesday, with prosecutors accusing him of criminally failing to try to stop the slaughter, while the defense said the officer did the best he could at the chaotic and confusing scene.
Former Uvalde school district police officer Adrian Gonzales, 52, was one of 376 officers from local, state and federal agencies who responded to the shooting and have since come under sharp criticism for waiting 77 minutes before entering a Robb Elementary classroom where the gunman was holed up. Teachers and children made lengthy calls to 911 emergency services, saying they were in the room with the gunman and surrounded by bodies.
Gonzales, who had spent a decade as a Uvalde city police officer before joining the school district’s force about a year before the shooting, was charged in 2024 with 29 counts of child endangerment, according to his indictment, which said that he “failed to engage, distract, and delay the shooter” and that he also failed “to follow his active shooter training to respond to gun fire by advancing toward the gun fire.”
Each count carries the possibility of two years in prison. Gonzales pleaded not guilty on Tuesday before opening statements began in the courtroom in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the trial was moved after the defense successfully argued he could not get a fair trial in Uvalde.
Special prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during his opening statement that within seconds after arriving at the school, a teacher told Gonzales where the gunman was and that he had relayed that information over his radio. Within seconds, the gunman was firing shots with his AR-style rifle from outside the school building into classrooms, and then made his way into the school through a door that had been propped open. He began firing inside the school, while Gonzales remained outside.
“Adrian Gonzales does nothing more than mike his microphone and tell other officers what’s going on,” Turner said, repeatedly choking back tears as he spoke.
The children inside the building were hiding and waiting for officers to come to their aid, the prosecutor added, but Gonzales and other police waited outside “as the slaughter begins.”
Two defense attorneys, in their opening statement, emphasized the chaotic scene and said that at no point did Gonzales see the gunman or fully understand where the gunman was, making it difficult to confront him.
The gunman, who had wrecked his car into a culvert near the school just minutes before he opened fire inside classrooms, had at first fired on a funeral parlor across the street from the school. When Gonzales arrived soon after, he did not understand the gunman was intent on killing students, but rather thought he was trying to escape the scene of the crash and funeral parlor shooting, the attorneys said.
They said the gunman entered the school about one minute after Gonzales arrived on campus and drove straight toward the only person he saw outside the building – a teacher who they said gave him incorrect information on the shooter’s whereabouts. Gonzales was one of the first three officers to enter the school.
“The government wants to make it seem like he just sat there,” defense attorney Nico LaHood said of Gonzales. “He didn’t just sit there. He did what he could with what he knew at the time.”
LaHood urged the jury to try to hold their emotions at bay in coming days as they hear and see the horrific details of the shooting. He said he understood it was a natural desire to want to hold someone accountable for the killings, especially given that the gunman was killed by police and unable to face accountability in court, but that laying it on Gonzales would be wrong.
“Pure evil visited that precious community,” LaHood said of Uvalde. “But it’s not rectified with injustice.”
Gonzales is one of two officers charged in connection with the school shooting.
Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the former chief of the Uvalde schools police and the person who investigators say was the officer in charge of the scene, faces 10 counts of the same charge. His trial has not yet been scheduled.
State and federal investigations into the shooting found that officers left the 18-year-old gunman alone inside the classroom with children while weighing how to confront him.
By the time a tactical team led by Border Patrol officers stormed in, the toll had reached among the worst in the history of a country known for high-profile school shootings.
Former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, in remarks made while presenting the federal report on Uvalde in 2024, said that “lives would have been saved” had the police immediately confronted the gunman.
School shootings that have plagued the U.S. in the past two decades routinely ignite debates between proponents of gun control measures and defenders of the constitutional right to bear arms, but have resulted in far fewer new restrictions on gun ownership than opponents of firearms want to see.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by Donna Bryson, Nia Williams and Alistair Bell)
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.