Adrian Gonzales was the first police officer to arrive at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on the day a gunman murdered 19 students and two teachers there. Gonzales, who worked for the school district, therefore became a special target of public anger at the manifestly inadequate police response to that horrifying 2022 attack.
Although hundreds of officers were involved in that response, Gonzales is one of just two who faced criminal charges in connection with the shooting, along with his boss, Pete Arredondo, the district's police chief. On Wednesday, a jury in Corpus Christi acquitted Gonzales of the 29 child endangerment charges against him, illustrating the difficulty of treating the failure to stop a mass shooting as a crime.
