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 in 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 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 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 was 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 is a staff 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.
