Just past 11:30 a.m. on May 24, 2022, four Uvalde school district police officers entered Robb Elementary School.
Officers Adrian Gonzales and Donald Page stepped in first, followed by Police Chief Pete Arredondo and Sergeant Daniel Coronado. They heard gunshots coming from two fourth grade classrooms. Over the next 77 minutes, a total of 376 officers from various law enforcement agencies converged on the scene — yet none entered the classrooms the shooter occupied until 12:50 p.m., according to a Texas House Investigative Committee report from 2022. Nineteen fourth graders and two teachers were killed in the shooting.
Two of those 376 responding officers are now set to go on trial, in the only criminal charges stemming from the delayed and heavily condemned police response: former chief Arredondo and officer Gonzales. Gonzales’ trial began Tuesday in Corpus Christi, after a judge ruled in October that it was unlikely for the officer to receive a fair trial if held in Uvalde.
Gonzales faces 29 counts of child endangerment and abandonment. He is accused of failing to engage, distract or impede the shooter, and failing to advance towards the shooter — despite hearing gunshots and knowing his general location — until after multiple children were shot at. Gonzales has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his attorney has said he tried to save children on that deadly day. If he’s convicted, he could face a maximum of two years in prison.
Arredondo, whose trail date has not yet been set according to ABC 11, is facing 10 counts of child endangerment and abandonment. Arredondo was fired from his position in August of 2022, and the entire five-person Uvalde school police force was later suspended and replaced, according to the New York Times.
According to the the 2022 Texas House Investigative Committee report, Arredondo was the chief of the Uvalde school district police force and made the decision when responding to the shooting to treat the attacker in the classroom as a barricaded subject, which usually requires negotiation and less aggressive action, rather than an active shooter, which usually requires immediate entry to stop the threat.
The decision to charge Gonzales, who was not in a position of command, has proven less clear and has elicited questions from the public about why he has been singled out from the crowd of more than 300 other officers. Requests for comment from The Barbed Wire to Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell asking why Gonzales has faced charges other responding officers have not were not immediately answered on Tuesday.
Sam Bassett, a criminal defense attorney based in Austin, told The Barbed Wire it is possible that prosecutors are trying to test the success of their charges against Gonzales before attempting to hold other officers accountable.
“To prosecute the very first officer on the scene is probably a good measure of whether or not other prosecutions might succeed,” Bassett said. “I think they started with the most obvious possible defendant to see how that would go through the court system and what the outcome might be. That will instruct them on how aggressive to be with regard to Arredondo or any other officers that might be charged.”
As prosecutors began laying out their case this week, more insight has already been gleaned about the focus on Gonzales: Prosecutor Bill Turner’s opening arguments were emotional and left him on the verge of tears, marking the first time authorities explained their rationale for charging the officer, ABC News reported. A teacher was “face-to-face” with the gunman Salvador Ramos before he even entered the school and told Gonzales his location, but Gonzales failed to act, Turner told jurors.
“She says, ‘He’s over there,’” Turner said. “She urges him to go get him.”
“He gets on the radio and says, ‘Shots are fired, he’s wearing black, he’s in the parking lot,’” Turner continued. “He knows where he is, but Adrian Gonzales remains at the south side of the school.”
Ramos “fired shots into a classroom full of children … Adrian Gonzales remains,” Turner said.
Beyond Gonzales and Arredondo, families of the victims have been vocal in their frustration that more officers have not been charged, the Associated Press previously reported. Velma Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was a teacher killed in the shooting, told the Associated Press that she wanted legal action against more of the responding officers after the charges were brought against Arredondo and Gonzales in 2024.
“I want every single person who was in the hallway charged for failure to protect the most innocent,” Duran said to the Associated Press. “My sister put her body in front of those children to protect them, something they could have done. They had the means and the tools to do it. My sister had her body.”
Charging officers for inaction in the line of duty is somewhat uncharted legal territory, Sandra Guerra Thompson told The Barbed Wire. Thompson is a professor of criminal law at the University of Houston Law Center.
“You’re talking about behavior that is ostensibly negligent, where there should have been some action taken that wasn’t taken, so we really don’t have a lot of precedent for it,” Thompson said. “The argument can be made that the length of time should have given officers time to realize the need for action.”
One of the only parallel cases is that of Scot Peterson, a Florida police officer who failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 during a shooting that left 17 dead. Peterson was charged with felony child neglect, but a jury found him not guilty in 2023, according to PBS.
Bassett said the prosecutions of Gonzales and Arredondo for child endangerment present a unique use of the charge that may be difficult to prove.
“Endangerment cases are typically prosecuted against parents or caregivers, and their duties are obvious, but this case is more of a challenge,” Bassett said. “The first thing the prosecution needs to do is to create a framework for the jury’s understanding of the duty that the officers had to protect the children. That was his job as a police officer in that situation.”
Gonzales’ attorney has argued that he is being scapegoated for a police response the Texas House report called a broad systemic failure.
“The entirety of law enforcement and its training, preparation, and response shares systemic responsibility for many missed opportunities on that tragic day,” the report reads.
One former Robb Elementary student, AJ Martinez, who was shot in the leg during the 2022 shooting, will be attending the trial of Gonzales, his mother Kassandra told The New York Times.
“He survived this and that officer did not go in,” Kassandra Martinez said to the Times.
The presiding judge said Gonzales’ trial is expected to last approximately two weeks, according to 6 ABC Philadelphia.