A school district police officer arrived at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, greater than a minute before a gunman entered the building and shot and killed 19 kids and two academics in May 2022, a brand new NCS evaluation has discovered.
Although official inquiries and media studies have targeted on how the shooter was not stopped for 77 minutes after getting into the school, the NCS investigation exhibits for the primary time how essential moments to cease the bloodbath could have been misplaced before the killing started.
Officer Adrian Gonzales was the primary member of legislation enforcement to get to the school, whereas the gunman was nonetheless exterior. He met a instructor who told him what the shooter was sporting and the path he was heading, before they each heard gunshots. Those gunshots from the car parking zone have been 59 seconds before the gunman walked into the school building, and 1 minute and 22 seconds before he shot his means into linked lecture rooms, NCS evaluation reveals.
What Gonzales did throughout these essential moments will probably be a pivotal query in Corpus Christi this week, as he goes on trial within the first case associated to the Uvalde bloodbath. The case is simply the second prison prosecution of an officer responding to a school capturing.
NCS discovered Gonzales waited for canopy from arriving officers and went into the school solely after the shooter had entered the 2 linked lecture rooms. The evaluation included inspecting Gonzales’ personal phrases and statements, surveillance video, physique digital camera footage, radio transmissions and witness interviews with investigators, that at the moment are anticipated to be a part of the proof launched by prosecutors.
It will probably be as much as jurors to determine if his alleged failures to behave put kids at risk and have been against the law.
Gonzales has pleaded not responsible to 29 counts of kid endangerment or abandonment. His lawyer, Nico LaHood, mentioned their place was clear: Gonzales is harmless. “We are looking forward to presenting our evidence and to questioning the government’s evidence in context,” he told NCS. “And we believe, and we have faith, that the jury system will function properly.”
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell has not previewed her case and has fought the discharge of knowledge before the trial.
New particulars concerning the bloodbath and the failed response are nonetheless rising, and any testimony that kids and academics may have been saved could be particularly devastating to bereaved households, lots of whom have questioned how lengthy it took for his or her family members to die.
There was some shock when Mitchell introduced fees last June in opposition to Gonzales, in addition to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s then-Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was extensively blamed for the disastrous legislation enforcement response.
So, NCS analyzed his video interview with investigators the day after the tragedy in addition to different investigative information to deal with his actions when Gonzales turned the primary officer to reply to studies of a person with a gun at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022.
Gonzales told investigators he was at a excessive school occasion on the Jardin de los Heroes Park, lower than a mile from Robb Elementary, when he heard a reference on his police radio at 11:29 a.m. of a automobile accident close to the school.
“When I was actually getting in my car, I heard the radio traffic that the guy has a gun,” he mentioned in an interview with legislation enforcement the day after the bloodbath, a part of an investigation file that was obtained by NCS.
Unreleased surveillance video obtained by NCS exhibits Gonzales driving onto school grounds by way of a wide-open gate lower than two minutes after the primary alert. He drove throughout a subject, seconds after the shooter had walked throughout the identical space heading to the instructor car parking zone. Police dispatch relayed info from callers to 911 that the shooter “has jumped the fence; they’re going to be in the school.”
Gonzales told investigators he targeted on a determine he noticed operating and falling, a coach on 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.
About 20 seconds after Gonzales arrived on the buildings, the gunman fired on the fourth-grade wing from the car parking zone, prompting Gonzales to broadcast, “Shots fired! Shots fired, Uvalde, at Robb school” at 11:32 a.m.
At that time, he would have been not more than 200 ft away from the shooter however on the opposite facet of a building.
NCS evaluation exhibits nearly a full minute passes from when the shooter opened fireplace exterior before he goes inside, and there’s one other 23 seconds before the blasts of gunfire as he enters linked fourth-grade lecture rooms 111 and 112 and slaughters lots of these inside with a high-powered rifle.
Gonzales, who was armed with a Glock pistol, mentioned he by no means noticed the gunman and didn’t fireplace a shot.
“I heard him, but I didn’t see him. And (the shots are) echoing, so I know they’re coming from the back; I just don’t know where from,” he told investigators.
At the top of his interview, throughout which he appeared calm however shaken, Gonzales provided that within the essential first seconds after arriving on the school he “went tunnel vision” on the coach whom he first noticed operating, falling after which getting up. “I locked in on her; that was my mistake. It was just the adrenaline rush going and shots fired and stuff like that,” he defined.
A second-grade instructor interviewed three days after the assault mentioned she noticed a police automobile come as much as her classroom at 11:31 a.m., the time captured on a screenshot she had simply taken on her laptop computer for a venture she was engaged on. Her room is lower than 140 ft from the fourth-grade building.
“(The coach) was screaming down the way, like ‘Close it, shut the door’ and the cop was rolling up as she was saying that,” she mentioned, describing Gonzales’s white patrol automobile with POLICE marked on it.
The coach who was talked about to investigators by Gonzales, the second-grade instructor and Arredondo in his debriefing, was interviewed one week after the capturing, the information obtained by NCS present. NCS has not been in a position to contact the coach or the instructor, and it’s not but recognized if they may testify, so has determined to guard their identification.
The Texas Ranger conducting the interview together with a particular agent from the FBI told the coach he had not heard concerning the police automobile arriving on the school buildings before the gunman entered the building.
The coach told him she fell because 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.”
Video, radio site visitors and Gonzales’ interview point out he didn’t enter the building instantly by himself. He mentioned he noticed vehicles arriving from the Uvalde Police Department, where he had served for 10 years before becoming a member of the school district police.
He referred to as a number of occasions for a unit to offer him cowl, radio transcripts present. And he tried to warn fellow officers concerning the hazard, he recalled to colleagues quickly after the gunman was killed. “I told them to stand back because they were coming in (and) he was shooting out the window,” he mentioned, captured on physique digital camera footage solely released in 2025 after a marketing campaign for public information to be made public. At that point, although, the gunman had but to enter the building. He was capturing from the skin.
Gonzales entered the hallway behind an officer from the Uvalde Police Department at 11:35 a.m., physique digital camera confirmed, adopted shortly after by Arredondo with one other officer from the town. More officers approached the school rooms from the opposite finish of the hallway and have been shot at by the gunman, surveillance video confirmed.
All of the officers then pulled again and the capturing stopped.
Asked by the investigators whether or not anybody mentioned, “we need to find this shooter,” Gonzales replied no.
“It did cross our mind. You know, we just never, nobody ever made, you know, we’re just covering each other,” he mentioned of these moments within the hallway full of gunsmoke and bullet casings littering the bottom. “You know, that’s what, basically, we’re doing.”
Gonzales, then 49, together with one other officer, left the building to make use of their radios as a result of they didn’t work inside. Gonzales didn’t return in till greater than an hour later, when the shooter was lifeless.
Call logs present he requested SWAT be activated at 11:38 a.m., despite the fact that ready for SWAT was discredited as a coverage for dealing with energetic shooters after the 1999 Columbine school bloodbath.
Also, native SWAT chief Eduardo Canales, armed with a rifle, was already there. He was the primary officer within the hallway from the top reverse Gonzales after they all moved towards the classroom
While he was exterior, Gonzales took up a place on the nook of the fourth-grade building, stating to arriving officers where the shooter was believed to be.
He requested directors whether or not the category of Eva Mireles was in session in room 112, then radioed that kids have been scheduled to be in there. Still on the nook of the building, he chatted sometimes with a UPD officer, sharing how he noticed the coach fall and stand up as he arrived, and that Mireles — a potential sufferer — was the spouse of a fellow school police officer, Ruben Ruiz. “Gonna be Ruben’s girl,” he mentioned, displaying no obvious urgency to cease the gunman.
Gonzales got a persist with prop open an exterior door for different officers and later helped to evacuate children from the window of room 102, urging them to “Run! Run!” a evaluate of physique digital camera footage exhibits.
He mentioned he got grasp keys from the upkeep supervisor, who would be taught later his stepdaughter was among the many lifeless. Gonzales additionally told investigators he checked on his colleague Ruiz, who had been disarmed by his fellow officers as he tried to maneuver towards the classroom where his spouse lay dying.
When the shooter was killed by a group led by Border Patrol brokers, Gonzales was one in all many responders who surged into the school rooms after the breach, seeing what had been performed there. He stayed for a number of minutes, video exhibits, holding the door to Mireles’ classroom after the surviving kids had been hustled out.
Almost 400 officers from a number of native, state and federal businesses went to Robb Elementary that day. The shooter was killed 77 minutes after he entered the school building.
Gonzales was interviewed by a Texas House investigative committee within the weeks after the capturing. The committee’s report didn’t observe his arrival on the scene. An exhaustive research by the Department of Justice with a minute-by-minute timeline recorded that Gonzales did arrive at Robb at 11:31 a.m. It mentioned, “The officer does not appear to see the subject, who is nearby in between vehicles in the parking lot.” But the report didn’t point out the coach giving him instructions or consult with Gonzales once more before he is recorded getting into the building.
Gonzales joined the Uvalde school police 10 months before the capturing. The Uvalde school district suspended all the drive’s actions in October 2022 within the wake of NCS reporting that the drive had employed a Texas state trooper who was underneath investigation for her actions throughout the response to the bloodbath. The drive was later reconstituted with solely new personnel.
NCS’S EXCLUSIVE REPORTING ON THE UVALDE MASSACRE
Arredondo had been fired three months after the assault. He was charged with 10 counts of kid endangerment with recognized prison negligence for failing to acknowledge the incident as an energetic capturing and for failing to take correct motion to intervene, the indictment said. His trial date has not been set. A survey from the Uvalde Leader-News final month discovered most native responders on the scene that day have been nonetheless working in legislation enforcement, some having been promoted or elected to their positions.
Gonzales’ trial will probably be solely the second within the US where a school police officer is prosecuted on fees of criminally failing to guard kids in a mass capturing. It follows the 2023 acquittal of Scot Peterson, the school useful resource officer who remained exterior Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as a teen gunman spent a bit over six minutes killing 17 classmates and academics and wounding 17 extra individuals in February 2018.
Peterson’s legal professional at that trial, Mark Eiglarsh, mentioned his shopper stayed exterior as a result of he couldn’t inform where the pictures have been coming from. Eiglarsh sees parallels between the circumstances of his shopper and Gonzales.
“The defense needs to focus on who’s really to blame, which is the shooter — the shooter. We’re here because of that monster and what he did. That needs to be the focus,” he told NCS.
“This case is won or lost in jury selection; it just is,” he mentioned. “You get the right jurors on there who can be fair and open-minded, they can be courageous and look victims in the eyes and say it’s possible that he could have done things differently. It’s possible that he didn’t even get it right. It’s possible that he didn’t do everything he was trained to do, but that doesn’t mean it was criminal.”
Though Eiglarsh did what he referred to as “noble and important work” and received the case for his shopper, he additionally mentioned it was the worst time in his profession.
“I know what it’s like to walk into a courtroom knowing that people have suffered the worst tragedy, my nightmare, losing children. So, rationality sometimes goes out the window,” he mentioned.
“We just believe that if there’s a guilty verdict, that’s going to make us feel better, and it was so tough every day knowing that in defending someone I believed was innocent, I was depriving the family members who were in the courtroom of something that they wanted. They wanted a guilty verdict.”
He mentioned he felt the lack of the households current in court docket day-after-day, and tried to embrace it, whereas not letting his shopper grow to be a scapegoat.
“You talk about how lives were lost, but we do not do justice for the victims by doing an injustice against the defendant,” he mentioned, choking up as he considered what lies forward for the Uvalde households.
Adult survivors of the Uvalde bloodbath, together with instructor Arnulfo Reyes, who was taunted by the gunman as he lay in a pool of his personal blood, have told NCS they are going to be referred to as to testify in Corpus Christi.
It can also be set to be an opportunity for Amy Marin-Franco to explain the minutes she spent on the cellphone with a 911 dispatcher, from calling to report a site visitors accident, to alerting that the driving force had a gun, that he was firing at her school after which had made it contained in the building. She was initially wrongly blamed for leaving a door propped open, permitting the gunman into the fourth-grade wing, despite the fact that video exhibits her pulling it closed.
For her and lots of others in Uvalde, it has already been greater than three-and-a-half years of loss, ache and unanswered questions. The trial will probably be live-streamed in the course of winter, however it’s going to take kids, academics, households and responders again to that baking scorching day in late spring. It was the final Tuesday of the school yr, a day when the work had been performed, and awards got to completely satisfied fourth-graders to mark their achievements. Nineteen of these college students, and two of their academics, by no means got to go house, after a gunman walked — unchallenged — into their school.