A Texas jury has found a police officer who responded to the 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, not guilty of child endangerment charges.
Officer Adrian Gonzales was charged with failing to act during the fatal shooting at Robb Elementary School in May 2022, when an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 students and two teachers.
Nearly 400 officers responded to Robb Elementary school but it took 77 minutes after the first officers arrived for police to confront and kill the shooter, according to a 2024 federal report.
The jury returned its not guilty verdict on Wednesday about seven hours after deliberations began.
Gonzales was cleared of all 29 counts relating to allegations of abandoning and endangering 19 deceased students and 10 survivors.
Prosecutors argued over the three-week trial that Gonzales, 52, failed to immediately confront the gunman as the first officer on the scene.
“You can’t stand by and allow it to happen,” special prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during closing arguments, saying the gunman needed to be stopped within the critical early moments of the shooting.
Defence lawyer Jason Goss said prosecutors were trying to scapegoat Gonzales, 52, and make him “pay for the pain of that day”.
His trial was a rare case in the US of a police officer charged with failing to protect children from criminal harm.
Criticisms over the emergency response to the Uvalde shooting became the subject of multiple lawsuits.
Victims’ families reached a $2m settlement(£1.49m) with the city of Uvalde in 2024 as compensation for the response to the incident, one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.
The 2024 report by the US Justice Department, released under the Biden administration, described a “lack of urgency” when police responded to the shooting.
The slow emergency response was a major focus of the report, which found police had failed to understand there was an active shooter, adding that there were “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training”
By BBC News
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