The trial of former Uvalde police officer Adrian Gonzales has been going on for just over two weeks now. Yesterday the defense rested its case after calling two witnesses and today the court is hearing closing arguments.
The trial started with opening arguments on Jan. 6, with the prosecution taking until Tuesday morning to lay out their case. After a brief rebuttal by the defense, Gonzales’ team asked for a directed verdict — which would allow San Antonio-based Judge Sid Harle to declare the trial over due to a lack of prosecutorial evidence.
Harle denied the motion, setting up a morning’s worth of closing testimony from both sides before the jury heads for deliberation on Wednesday.
Prosecutors called a total of 35 witnesses in the case. The most important witnesses were teacher’s aid Melodye Flores and Gonzales himself. Gonzales gave a statement the day after the shooting to a Texas Ranger in which he admitted to making a mistake.
“Now that I can sit back, I went tunnel vision, like I said, with the lady that was running,” Gonzales said in the hour-long video interview played for the jury. “That was my mistake.”
Gonzales also described in the video waiting for cover from other arriving officers and offered that as the reason he didn’t immediately enter the school and find the shooter.
Melodye Flores was the lady Gonzales saw running. He chased her down in his car, driving right past the shooter in the parking lot, who ducked behind another car to avoid being seen. Flores testified that she’d run outside to make sure there were no children playing who might be targeted by the shooter. When Gonzales arrived she told him the gunman was headed into the building, but Gonzales didn’t react.
“I told him that [the shooter] needed to get stopped before he went into the fourth-grade building,” she testified.
“And what did he say?” prosecutor Bill Turner asked.
“He, just, nothing,” Flores said.
“Did you say it more than once?” Turner asked.
“I did,” Flores said, telling jurors she urged Gonzales to intervene two or three times…
“I just kept pointing. ‘He’s going in there, he’s going to the fourth-grade building,'” she told jurors…
“When you told the officer to go in, did he go in?” Turner asked.
“No,” she said.
“What did he do?” Turner asked.
“He just stayed there,” she said.
She testified that Gonzales was just pacing back and forth. Meanwhile, the timeline shows the shooter had entered the building, walked down a hallway and shot his way into a classroom.
One of the defense witnesses was a retired San Antonio SWAT officer named Willie Cantu. He testified that Gonzales may have been suffering from “inattentive blindness” as a result of the stress of the situation. But the prosecution pushed back hard on that during cross examination.
Special prosecutor Bill Turner pushed back, asking if an officer hearing hundreds of shots fired at a school would be correct to call for cover and wait until other officers arrived.
“Civilians are in trouble, you know the gunman’s inside where the shots are coming from, but you’re asking cover for yourself, correct? That’s what Adrian (Gonzales) did, right?” Turner asked.
“Yeah, that’s what happened,” Cantu responded.
The prosecutor’s closing argument centered on Gonzales’ failure to act.
“If it’s appropriate to stand outside hearing [hundreds of] shots while children are being slaughtered, that is your decision to tell the state of Texas,” Turner said.
While teachers and students were sheltering in their classrooms — doing exactly what their training taught them to do in an active shooter scenario — the police officer trained to help them failed to act, Turner said. Turner argued that each gunshot fired at Robb Elementary was “notice to Adrian Gonzalez to advance toward the gunfire,” but he failed to follow his training and act in the crucial first minutes of the shooting…
“The training is, you hear shots, you go to the gunfire. He heard shots, and Melodye Flores was pointing where to go to the gunfire. There’s nothing complicated about that,” Turner said.
As I’ve mentioned before, we know Gonzales was familiar with the training for active shooter situations because he’d taught a class on the topic just two months earlier.
Gonzales is charged with 29 counts of child endangerment. So, in theory the jury will decide on one count and that decision will apply to all counts. We should have a verdict this week.
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