Two Uvalde Police Officers to Enter Pleas Over Shooting Response

UVALDE, Texas — Two years after one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, one of the two police officers who face criminal charges over the delayed police response was scheduled to be arraigned in court Thursday.

Adrian Gonzales, who was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene of the May 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was expected to enter a formal plea to charges stemming from his failure to confront the assailant before backup arrived.

Pete Arredondo, the former school district police chief, who was identified in various investigations as the effective incident commander, waived his right to attend the hearing and entered a plea of not guilty in court filings.

The two officers — among more than 370 who were involved to some degree or another in the police response that day — were indicted by a grand jury on charges of abandoning and endangering a child, the first criminal charges to stem from the shooting and its aftermath.

The shooting occurred on May 24, 2022, when a teenage assailant armed with an AR-15-style rifle made his way into two connected classrooms at Robb Elementary School and terrorized fourth grade students and their teachers. Meanwhile, police officers from a variety of agencies waited outside in the hallway. Some 77 minutes elapsed before a tactical team, led by federal Border Patrol agents, confronted and killed the shooter.

Arredondo has said that he had considered the assailant to be no longer an active shooter but a barricaded subject, and that he had focused on safely evacuating nearby classrooms until a team with sufficient armament could storm the shooter’s location.

While many of the 19 students and two teachers who died were probably killed instantly, the U.S. Justice Department said in its investigation that more lives might have been saved had police officers entered the classrooms sooner.

A series of investigations all found that a cascade of failures of leadership, decision making, tactics, policy and training led to the disastrous police response.

The hearing Thursday marks the first time that families of the victims and the survivors will have faced the officers in person since the charges were filed, though some of them expressed disappointment that Arredondo would not be in court.

“Since the days following the attacks, he has had a lack of responsibility,” said Jesse Rizo, the uncle of one of the victims, 9-year-old Jackie Cazares. “He lives in a different reality. He doesn’t show up. That’s his pattern.”

Javier Montemayor, the lawyer who is representing Arredondo, said that his client had chosen to waive his appearance for logistical reasons but also understood that his presence could be difficult for many of the family members. Dozens of friends and relatives of the victims erupted in cheers and applause after Arredondo was fired during a school board meeting three months after the shooting. Arredondo also skipped that appearance.

“We understand that there are a lot of upset people,” Montemayor said, adding that his client was expected to attend future court hearings. “We are anxious to see what the evidence shows,” he said.

Arredondo, who was in charge of the six-person department with jurisdiction over Uvalde schools, faces 10 counts of abandoning and endangering a child.

Investigators said that he had improperly failed to identify the incident as an active shooter situation and had failed to follow standard training for responding to such situations. The consequence was delayed care for 10 schoolchildren who survived the massacre, as well as for any who may have been shot or who succumbed to their wounds during the law enforcement standoff.

The indictment states that Arredondo chose to negotiate with the assailant while he “was engaged in an active shooter incident, delaying the response by law enforcement officers to a shooter who was hunting and shooting a child or children in Room 112 at Robb Elementary School.”

Gonzales was indicted on a total of 29 counts. The officer, who was also employed by the school district, was one of the first to arrive at the scene and was aware of the gunman’s location, the indictment said. However, he did not “engage, distract and delay the shooter, and failed to otherwise act to impede the shooter until after the shooter entered Rooms 111 and 112 of Robb Elementary School,” the indictment added.

Nico LaHood, a lawyer for Gonzales and a former district attorney for Bexar County, Texas, said that the application of the child endangerment law to a police officer responding to a mass shooting was “unprecedented” in Texas.

“Mr. Gonzales’ position is he did not violate state law,” LaHood said in a statement. “It will take time to evaluate these allegations and the underlying facts.”

Family members of the victims said they welcomed the charges but expressed regret that more officers did not face consequences. Since the tragedy, many of the family members of the victims and survivors have joined a growing roster of homegrown lobbyists who have traveled the country and met with elected officials to plead for stricter gun laws, better training for police officers and criminal accountability for any officers who failed to do their duty.

Convictions of officers who fail to follow mass shooting protocols are rare. In Parkland, Florida, a former sheriff’s deputy, Scot Peterson — who was charged with child neglect and other crimes for not confronting the gunman who killed 17 people at a high school in 2018 — was ultimately found not guilty by a jury.

And such cases can be grueling. The parents of Noah Orona, one of the 10 survivors in Uvalde, said they would not attend Thursday’s court hearing but planned to focus instead on preparing their son for the start of the school year.

“We demanded transparency and accountability,” said Noah’s father, Oscar Orona. “We are now left to rely on our justice system to decide their fate.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .