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UVALDE TRIAL RAISES QUESTION OF WHETHER POLICE STOP SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
 
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Michelle Pitcher
January 22, 2026
Texas Observer
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_ Since Columbine, expectations for cops have been clear. But reality
often hasn’t measured up. _

Law enforcement gather outside Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022. , (AP
Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, File)

 

Earlier this month, a few dozen police officers, school district
representatives, and one pro-Trump candidate for Congress crowded
together in a room above the cafeteria at Samuel V. Champion High
School in Boerne. School was cancelled for the day, but there was
activity in the hallways, which was being shown on large TV screens at
the front of the room. Viewers opened up their phone cameras in
anticipation of the demonstration. 

Three drones whirred loudly in a gray metal box in the corner, the
fans kicking up enough wind to rustle notebooks. Then, the drones
zipped away, down a labyrinth of hallways, toward a mock school
shooter.

The technology on display was the product of the Austin-based Campus
Guardian Angel, which posits that drones could be the missing piece of
this country’s response to school shootings. If a school district
buys the tech, drones are placed throughout each campus, ready to fly
at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour toward a threat. Once there, the
drones can distract the potential shooter, buzzing around like flies,
flashing strobe lights and blaring sirens. They can also shoot pepper
balls and, if all else fails, ram directly into the person. 

“We talk about Uvalde a lot because in Texas, everybody’s very
familiar with it, but that kid crashed his car into a culvert. … It
took him [several] minutes to get into the school,” said Bill King,
the company’s chief tactical officer. “We would have worn him out.
There’s no way he ever would have gotten in.”

About 175 miles away from the drone presentation, the first week of
trial was wrapping up for Adrian Gonzales, a former Uvalde CISD
officer and the first cop to face potential criminal legal
consequences for the botched police response to the deadliest school
shooting in Texas history.

The Robb Elementary memorial in Uvalde in July 2022 (Gus Bova)

On May 24, 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos shot and killed 19
students and two teachers in a pair of adjoined classrooms at Robb
Elementary School, where he had been a student years before. A small
army of police from various agencies, including 149 Border Patrol
agents and 91 state troopers, quickly assembled, but more than 70
minutes passed before officers finally breached the classroom and
killed Ramos. 

This now-infamous police inaction hasn’t been the only target of
blame for the tragedy. There’s the gun shop that armed a troubled
teen with two assault-style rifles, for example, and there were issues
with door locks
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the school. The shooter had also been giving off warning signs for
quite some time before the massacre. But the police response in
particular has fueled intense national attention to the tragedy, in
addition to inflaming the Uvalde families’ grief—even as the
questions of whether any officer was in a position to realistically
avert the shooting, and of how many lives would have been saved had
officers taken the shooter out more quickly, remain open and painful.

In 2022, Uvalde CISD fired its police chief and then suspended its
entire police force. The school district’s superintendent resigned
under pressure, and a number of civil lawsuits have been filed. The
U.S. Department of Justice investigated the police response to the
shooting and issued a scathing report in 2024. But there’s been
nothing approaching widespread accountability. The trial of Gonzales
was the long-awaited result of a criminal investigation that the local
district attorney used as a reason to fight the release of records
related to the shooting, to the dismay of many of the families who
lost their kids.

Of the nearly 400 law enforcement officers who responded to the
shooting scene, only two have been charged criminally for their part
in the response: Gonzales and the former Uvalde CISD police chief,
Pete Arredondo. Gonzales, one of the first officers on scene the day
of the shooting, was indicted by a Uvalde County grand jury in 2024 on
29 counts of child endangerment, after prosecutors argued he failed to
distract or delay Ramos despite knowing where he was. Arredondo was
indicted
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on 10 counts of child endangerment. They both pleaded not guilty, and
Arredondo’s trial date has yet to be set. 

Although the DOJ investigation
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found that there were “cascading failures of leadership,
decision-making, tactics, policy, and training,” prosecutors have
not clarified why none of the other officers have been charged for
their actions that day. Early efforts to hold other agencies
accountable seem to have been stymied by politics. For example, Texas
Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell
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reinstated after being fired for his role in the Uvalde response after
the DA, Christina Mitchell, requested it. 

It’s extremely rare for officers to be held criminally responsible
for not protecting someone on the job, especially during mass
shootings. Though the case against Gonzales has some precedent: In
2023, a former sheriff’s deputy in Broward County, Florida, was
tried and acquitted of child neglect and negligence after being
charged for not confronting the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School in Parkland in 2018. 

Gonzales’ defense team, led by former Bexar County District Attorney
Nico LaHood, argued during trial that Gonzales did actively respond to
the threat. He and several other officers entered the school shortly
after arriving, but retreated when they heard gunfire and one of the
officers appeared to be grazed by a bullet. After that, he helped
students and teachers in other classrooms where the shooter was not
located escape through windows.

LaHood argued that Gonzales never actually saw the teen and therefore
didn’t have the chance to stop him. 

More than 400 prospective jurors were called on January 5 for
Gonzales’ trial, which was moved out of Uvalde to Nueces County due
to fairness concerns. Even with the large pool, it took only one day
to seat 12 jurors and four alternates. 

Over nine days of witness testimony, the jury heard emotional
recountings from former teachers, some of whom were shot, victims’
family members, and other officers who responded to the scene. Texas
Rangers from the Department of Public Safety—who had been tapped by
Mitchell to investigate the police response—recreated a timeline of
that morning and compared Ramos’ movements to Gonzales’. The
timeline showed Gonzales stayed by his patrol car for nearly four
minutes, according to trial testimony, during which the shooter
entered the school.

Melodye Flores, a former teacher’s aide, said that she saw a man
with a gun outside and told Gonzales multiple times, over the course
of those minutes, where he was headed. “He just stayed there,” she
testified last week. “He was pacing back and forth.” 

Flores and the witnesses brought by the state largely supported the
prosecution’s core argument: that Gonzales could have and should
have done more to stop Ramos from taking 21 lives. 

In the courtroom, the jury decides what’s true in a legal sense; to
the broader public, the question is a moral and ethical one, too.  

“You must assume that unless you stop that shooter, more people are
going to die or be seriously injured,” Mo Candy, executive director
of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) told
the _Texas Observer_. “In most instances, it’s going to be one
officer on campus. So it’s not like you’re going to have a whole
[armed] team there with you to respond. So you are the person that
this depends on now, to find the shooter and to stop it.”

 

_Michelle Pitcher_
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writer at the Texas Observer covering criminal justice. She received
her master’s in journalism from the University of California,
Berkeley and was part of the team at The Marshall Project that won the
Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Her reporting has been featured
on NPR, FiveThirtyEight, The Dallas Morning News, and more. Michelle
was born and raised in Dallas and is now based in Austin._

_The Texas Observer is a progressive nonprofit news outlet and print
magazine covering the Lone Star State. The Observer strives to make
Texas a more equitable place through investigative reporting,
narrative storytelling, and political and cultural coverage and
commentary. We dig beyond the headlines and contextualize news events.
Our essays, reviews, and criticism seek to create a new cultural canon
and challenge existing mythologies._

* Uvalde
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* school shootings
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