Texas jury clears police officer for Uvalde school shooting response
A jury in Texas found a police officer who responded to a 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, not guilty of child endangerment charges.
Officer Adrian Gonzales was accused of failing to take action during the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School in May 2022, when an 18-year-old gunman shot 19 students and two teachers.
About 400 officers responded to Robb Elementary school, but it took 77 minutes for the first officers to arrive to confront and kill the attacker, according to a 2024 federal report.
The jury returned a not guilty verdict Wednesday, about seven hours after deliberations began.
Gonzales was cleared of all 29 charges related to allegations of abandonment and endangerment of the 19 dead students and 10 survivors.
Prosecutors argued during the three-week trial that Gonzales, 52, failed to immediately confront the gunman as the first police officer at the scene.
“You can’t let this happen,” special prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during closing arguments, saying the gunman should have been stopped in the critical early moments of the shootout.
Defense attorney Jason Goss said prosecutors were trying to scapegoat Gonzales, 52, and “make him pay for the pain of that day.”
His case was a rare case in the United States in which a police officer was accused of failing to protect children from criminal harm.
Criticisms of the emergency response to the Uvalde attack have been the subject of numerous lawsuits.
Families of the victims have reached a $2 million (£1.49 million) settlement with the city of Uvalde in 2024 as compensation for the response to what was one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.
In the 2024 report of the US Department of Justice published under the Biden administration, it was stated that the police response to the shooting was “lack of urgency”.
The slow emergency response was a key focus of the report, which found police failed to recognize the presence of an active attacker and noted “repeated failures in leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training”.
