Jury acquits former Uvalde school officer in first criminal trial tied to Robb Elementary shooting

From Texas Public Radio:

A Nueces County jury on Wednesday acquitted former Uvalde CISD police officer Adrian Gonzales of all charges in the first criminal trial tied to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers.

As the verdict was read, several family members of the victims sat in silence, visibly emotional, some covering their faces as they wiped away tears.

“It’s been an emotional roller coaster since day one. We prepared for the worst,” said Javier Cazares, who lost his 9-year-old daughter, Jackie, in the shooting. “We had a little hope, but it wasn’t enough.”

Jesse Rizo, the uncle of Jackie Cazares, said he respected the jury’s decision but believes it sends a troubling message to law enforcement in future situations.

“If you’re an officer, you can stand by, stand down, and do nothing while people are executed, killed, slaughtered, massacred,” Rizo said. “Is that the message you sent today?”

The verdict ends the first attempt to hold a law enforcement officer criminally responsible for the delayed police response to the massacre, in which nearly 400 officers waited more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Prosecutors had argued Gonzales, one of the first officers on scene, failed to act quickly enough to stop or delay the shooter. Defense attorneys said Gonzales never saw the gunman and acted reasonably given the limited information available to him at the time.

During closing arguments earlier Wednesday, attorneys on both sides told jurors their verdict would send a message to law enforcement officers across Texas — though they disagreed sharply on what that message should be.

Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell urged jurors to hold Gonzales accountable, arguing that officers are trained to move toward gunfire without waiting for backup.

“We cannot continue to let children die in vain,” Mitchell said, asking jurors to return a guilty verdict.

Defense attorney Nico LaHood urged jurors to reject what he described as an effort to single out one officer for systemic failures.

“Send a message to the government that it wasn’t right to concentrate on Adrian Gonzales,” LaHood told the jury. “You can’t pick and choose.”

A key point of disagreement centered on timing. Prosecutors said Gonzales waited roughly three and a half minutes before entering the school hallway. The defense said there were fewer than two minutes between Gonzales’ arrival and the shooter entering the fourth-grade classrooms where the victims were killed.

Gonzales was charged with 29 counts of child endangerment — one count for each of the 19 children who were killed and the 10 who were injured but survived. The jury found him not guilty on all counts after more than seven hours of deliberation.

The trial had been moved from Uvalde County to Corpus Christi after defense attorneys argued Gonzales could not receive a fair trial in Uvalde.

Former Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who investigators have described as the incident commander during the response, is awaiting a separate trial on charges connected to the shooting.

The verdict leaves unresolved questions for families of the victims seeking accountability for the police response.

“This is a long day coming for Adrian and his family, but we’re humbled by the verdict,” LaHood told reporters. “We also know that there’s families on the other side that are dealing with this new normal that they’ve had for three years, and they’re still in pain, and so this was a disappointment for them. We acknowledge that.”

David Shapiro, director of the MPA Inspection and Oversight Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former prosecutor and FBI agent, said one argument from the defense captured why jurors acquitted Gonzales.

“What struck me here was one of the defense attorneys’ comments was this man is being scapegoated,” Shapiro said. “I hate to oversimplify, but that seems to be the best one-sentence summary of why the defendant was acquitted.”

Shapiro said he would not be surprised if the separate case against Arredondo also ends in an acquittal.

He pointed to extensive state and federal investigations, including a roughly 600-page Justice Department report and a report by the Texas Legislature, that found systemic failures in the law enforcement response.

“So I think if you’re going to make a criminal case out of it, then you have to make it a criminal case about all of those persons that played a material role in allowing this event to go on for 77 minutes,” Shapiro said.

Victims’ family members said they will return to the courtroom when the next chapter of their pursuit of accountability begins.

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