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.”
Candy said school officers should be “carefully selected, specifically trained, and properly equipped in order to be able to be effective in the job.”
School district police departments are becoming more common in Texas, often increasing after a mass shooting. Many districts that don’t have their own police force have city police officers stationed at schools. Since 1999, the year of the Columbine shooting in Colorado, the federal government has devoted an estimated $1 billion to putting sworn police officers in schools.
But the efficacy of these officers remains unproven, especially in the case of mass shootings.
Research is relatively scarce on the subject, but one study found that on campuses with officers present, more people died in shootings than at schools without police. The study didn’t look at cases where the shooter was stopped before firing, but cases of officers or even armed bystanders thwarting potential shooters are rare.
Neal McCluskey, director of the CATO Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, said that school police officers face a reality that’s messier than policies and training often prepare them for.
“I think the Uvalde situation is kind of illustrative of that,” McCluskey told the Observer. “You can have somebody who is called a school resource officer, you can have lots of police present, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be able to stop a shooter.”
In Uvalde, district officers had completed an active shooter training just two months before Ramos opened fire at Robb Elementary. Yet, in a report released in 2022, investigators from the Texas House of Representatives found that officers on the scene at Robb Elementary “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”
Dr. Lisa Ross, author of the book “School Shootings in American Culture,” said this gap between expectations—promoted by police leaders themselves as well as those counting on their protection—and reality represents a profound problem.
After the 1999 Columbine mass shooting, which involved a Uvalde-esque period of police inaction, it became the expectation and standard practice for any cop to immediately confront the shooter, rather than waiting for backup or more tactically trained units to arrive.
“Columbine broke the mold,” Ross said. “The next thing is, ‘Well, what do we do?’ And the answer was, ‘There’s no time to get a team together.’ So the first person on the scene needs to do what we would have done.” In other words, it would no longer be accepted, at least theoretically, to let the death count rise inside a school while waiting for SWAT to arrive.
“The public expects you to sacrifice your life for the innocent children and staff,” Ross said. “That’s the public’s expectation, but that’s different than what actually goes on in law enforcement.”
In the shooting’s wake, some bereaved Uvalde family members have expressed their own doubts about the abilities of heroic police officers to save kids like theirs, opting to prioritize what many consider the real root issue: the easy availability of highly lethal assault-style rifles. These families engaged in intense advocacy during the 2023 legislative session for a bill to raise the age for buying such weapons of war from 18 to 21, a measure that would have legally barred Ramos from acquiring his guns. The bill made it through a House committee, but no further.
Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares was killed at Robb and who’s been at the forefront of calls for accountability, was elected last year to the Uvalde CISD school board. On Wednesday, he was in the courtroom in Corpus Christi when the jury foreman read the verdict in Gonzales’ trial: not guilty.
“It was like a kick in the gut,” Rizo told the Observer. He watched Gonzales reacting to the acquittal, hugging his wife and daughter.
“I’m thinking, ‘Man, it’s incredible how you failed … but you get to embrace your wife, you get to embrace your daughter,” Rizo said. “And these parents can’t embrace their kids anymore.”
Javier Cazares, father of Jackie, at the Governor’s Mansion in November 2022 after marching from the Capitol to demand gun control legislation (Gus Bova)
Rizo said, despite the disappointment of a not-guilty verdict, he’s glad he was in the courtroom. Hearing the evidence, he got “answers to a lot of questions that were lingering for a long time.” He’s awaiting the trial of Arredondo and hoping for a different outcome for the ex-police chief, and he said he’d like to see more officers prosecuted, if only so they or their lawyers must get in front of a jury to answer questions.
“It’s important,” he said. “What grounds me is there’s little children that can’t speak for themselves anymore, and you have to—as painful as it is—you have to see it through.”
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