The First Trial of a Uvalde Police Officer Began Today

There are two trials set to take place of police officers who responded to the Uvalde school shooting back in May 2022. The more well known defendant is Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde schools police chief. The start date of his trial hasn't been scheduled yet. But today was the start of the trial against officer Adrian Gonzales, the first officer to arrive at the school that day.

Adrian Gonzales, one of the first officers to respond to the 2022 attack, is charged with 29 counts of child abandonment or endangerment in a rare prosecution of an officer accused of not doing more to save lives. Authorities waited more than an hour to confront the teenage shooter.

Gonzales has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney has said the officer tried to save children that day.

Jury selection began Monday at a Texas courthouse where a long line of prospective jurors stretched outside before the proceedings got underway.

The district attorney who brought charges against Gonzales has been tight-lipped about her case but the general outlines are well understood.

A series of state and federal investigations have all concluded that a cascade of failures in leadership, decision making, tactics, policy and training led to the much criticized police response.

Mr. Gonzales is facing a total of 29 counts. According to the indictment, he was one of the first to arrive at the scene and was aware of the gunman’s location. He did not “engage, distract and delay the shooter, and failed to otherwise act to impede the shooter until after the shooter entered Rooms 111 and 112 of Robb Elementary School,” the indictment added.

CNN published a lengthy exclusive story today looking at all of the evidence from various witnesses, interviews and from body cam footage. What they found is that Gonzales was on the scene before the shooter ever entered the school building but did nothing to stop him or get inside first.

Unreleased surveillance video obtained by CNN shows Gonzales driving onto school grounds through a wide-open gate less than two minutes after the first alert. He drove across a field, seconds after the shooter had walked across the same area heading to the teacher parking lot. Police dispatch relayed information from callers to 911 that the shooter “has jumped the fence; they’re going to be in the school.”

Gonzales told investigators he focused on a figure he saw running and falling, a coach at the school.

“She tells me, ‘He’s over there, he’s over there!’ I go, ‘Who’s over there?’ She goes, ‘He’s over there, the shooter. He’s wearing black. He’s wearing black.’ And I go, ‘Where?’” he told the Texas Rangers in his interview.

But the coach's recollection of that conversation was different.

The coach who was mentioned to investigators by Gonzales...was interviewed one week after the shooting, the records obtained by CNN show...

The Texas Ranger conducting the interview along with a special agent from the FBI told the coach he had not heard about the police car arriving at the school buildings before the gunman entered the building.

The coach told him she fell as the officer arrived. “As I’m getting up, that’s when one of the cops with this car just slams his brakes there, and I’m telling him, I said, ‘He’s going into the fourth-grade building. We need to stop him; we need to do something! We need to do something!’” she told the investigators.

“And he comes out and he’s panicking, too. He’s running back and forth. And I told him, I said that we need to go in. ‘We need to stop him before he goes in,’ I said. And then by the time we knew it, (the shooter) already had made his way into the fourth-grade building. And all you heard, it was just shot, shot, shots.”

What had actually happened is that Gonzalez had driven his patrol car right past the shooter who was still outside in the parking lot. So the shooter was on one side of the building and Gonzalez was being told by the coach to go in from the other side. Then they both heard shots being fired. These were fired from outside the building as the shooter walked toward the entrance. Instead of moving, Gonzales sent a radio request for backup.

He called several times for a unit to give him cover, radio transcripts show. And he tried to warn fellow officers about the danger, he recalled to colleagues soon after the gunman was killed. “I told them to stand back because they were coming in (and) he was shooting out the window,” he said, captured on body camera footage only released in 2025 after a campaign for public records to be made public. At that time, though, the gunman had yet to enter the building. He was shooting from the outside.

Several minutes after he'd arrived, Gonzales and three other officers, including Chief Arredondo, finally went into the building and made their way to the classroom. The shooter fired several shots and them and all four pulled back. From this point it was another 77-minutes before a team pushed into the room and killed the shooter. For his part, Gonzales quickly made his way back outside where he took up a position and warned arriving officers where the shooter was believed to be.

The judge in this case is said to be determined to choose a jury tonight so that the 400 or so possible jurors who aren't selected can return to work tomorrow. So we could see some progress in the trial as soon as tomorrow.