By Andrew Hay
Jan 21 (Reuters) – A Texas jury acquitted a former police officer of criminal child-endangerment charges on Wednesday stemming from his role in the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 elementary students and two teachers.
Adrian Gonzales, 52, who belonged to the Uvalde school district police force, had faced 29 counts of felony child endangerment for what prosecutors said was his failure to stop the gunman in the first minutes of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
The gunman, an 18-year-old former student at the school, was ultimately shot dead by other officers.
The Corpus Christi jury deliberated seven hours before reaching its not guilty verdict on all 29 counts, each of which carried up to two years in prison in a rare trial of a police officer charged with failing to halt a crime and save lives.
Gonzalez was accused of neglecting to immediately confront the shooter in the first critical minutes after he arrived on the scene of the shooting.
“You can’t stand by and allow it to happen,” Special Prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during closing arguments.
Defense lawyer Jason Goss countered that prosecutors were trying to scapegoat Gonzales and make him “pay for the pain of that day.”
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Editing by Steve Gorman, Christian Schmollinger and Himani Sarkar)
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