A school district police officer arrived at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, more than a minute before a gunman entered the building and shot and killed 19 children and two teachers in May 2022, a new CNN analysis has found.
Although official inquiries and media reports have focused on how the shooter was not stopped for 77 minutes after entering the school, the CNN investigation shows for the first time how crucial moments to stop the massacre may have been lost before the killing began.
Officer Adrian Gonzales was the first member of law enforcement to get to the school, while the gunman was still outside. He met a teacher who told him what the shooter was wearing and the direction he was heading, before they both heard gunshots. Those gunshots from the parking lot were 59 seconds before the gunman walked into the school building, and 1 minute and 22 seconds before he shot his way into connected classrooms, CNN analysis reveals.
What Gonzales did during those crucial moments will be a pivotal question in Corpus Christi this week, as he goes on trial in the first case related to the Uvalde massacre. The case is just the second criminal prosecution of an officer responding to a school shooting.
CNN found Gonzales waited for cover from arriving officers and went into the school only after the shooter had entered the two connected classrooms. The analysis included examining Gonzales’ own words and statements, surveillance video, body camera footage, radio transmissions and witness interviews with investigators, that are now expected to be part of the evidence introduced by prosecutors.
It will be up to jurors to decide if his alleged failures to act put children in danger and were a crime.
Gonzales has pleaded not guilty to 29 counts of child endangerment or abandonment. His lawyer, Nico LaHood, said their position was clear: Gonzales is innocent. “We are looking forward to presenting our evidence and to questioning the government’s evidence in context,” he told CNN. “And we believe, and we have faith, that the jury system will function properly.”
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell has not previewed her case and has fought the release of information before the trial.
New details about the massacre and the failed response are still emerging, and any testimony that children and teachers could have been saved would be especially devastating to bereaved families, many of whom have wondered how long it took for their loved ones to die.
There was some surprise when Mitchell announced charges last June against Gonzales, as well as Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s then-Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was widely blamed for the disastrous law enforcement response.
So, CNN analyzed his video interview with investigators the day after the tragedy as well as other investigative records to focus on his actions when Gonzales became the first officer to respond to reports of a man with a gun at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022.
Gonzales told investigators he was at a high school event at the Jardin de los Heroes Park, less than a mile from Robb Elementary, when he heard a reference on his police radio at 11:29 a.m. of a vehicle accident near the school.
“When I was actually getting in my car, I heard the radio traffic that the guy has a gun,” he said in an interview with law enforcement the day after the massacre, part of an investigation file that was obtained by CNN.
I heard him, but I didn’t see him.
Adrian Gonzales to investigators the day after the massacre
Unreleased surveillance video obtained by CNN shows Gonzales driving onto school grounds through a wide-open gate less than two minutes after the first alert. He drove across a field, seconds after the shooter had walked across the same area heading to the teacher parking lot. Police dispatch relayed information from callers to 911 that the shooter “has jumped the fence; they’re going to be in the school.”
Gonzales told investigators he focused on a figure he saw running and falling, a coach at the school.
“She tells me, ‘He’s over there, he’s over there!’ I go, ‘Who’s over there?’ She goes, ‘He’s over there, the shooter. He’s wearing black. He’s wearing black.’ And I go, ‘Where?’” he told the Texas Rangers in his interview.
About 20 seconds after Gonzales arrived at the buildings, the gunman fired at the fourth-grade wing from the parking lot, prompting Gonzales to broadcast, “Shots fired! Shots fired, Uvalde, at Robb school” at 11:32 a.m.
At that point, he would have been no more than 200 feet away from the shooter but on the other side of a building.
I locked in on her; that was my mistake. It was just the adrenaline rush going and shots fired and stuff like that.
Adrian Gonzales to investigators the day after the massacre
CNN analysis shows almost a full minute passes from when the shooter opened fire outside before he goes inside, and there is another 23 seconds before the blasts of gunfire as he enters connected fourth-grade classrooms 111 and 112 and slaughters many of those inside with a high-powered rifle.
Gonzales, who was armed with a Glock pistol, said he never saw the gunman and did not fire a shot.
“I heard him, but I didn’t see him. And (the shots are) echoing, so I know they’re coming from the back; I just don’t know where from,” he told investigators.
At the end of his interview, during which he appeared calm but shaken, Gonzales offered that in the crucial first seconds after arriving at the school he “went tunnel vision” on the coach whom he first saw running, falling and then getting up. “I locked in on her; that was my mistake. It was just the adrenaline rush going and shots fired and stuff like that,” he explained.
A second-grade teacher interviewed three days after the attack said she saw a police car come up to her classroom at 11:31 a.m., the time captured on a screenshot she had just taken on her laptop for a project she was working on. Her room is less than 140 feet from the fourth-grade building.
“(The coach) was screaming down the way, like ‘Close it, shut the door’ and the cop was rolling up as she was saying that,” she said, describing Gonzales’s white patrol car with POLICE marked on it.
I’m telling him, I said, ‘He’s going into the fourth-grade building. We need to stop him; we need to do something! We need to do something!’
School coach, recalling what she told Gonzales, in interview with investigators
The coach who was mentioned to investigators by Gonzales, the second-grade teacher and Arredondo in his debriefing, was interviewed one week after the shooting, the records obtained by CNN show. CNN has not been able to contact the coach or the teacher, and it is not yet known if they will testify, so has decided to protect their identity.
The Texas Ranger conducting the interview along with a special agent from the FBI told the coach he had not heard about the police car arriving at the school buildings before the gunman entered the building.
The coach told him she fell as the officer arrived. “As I’m getting up, that’s when one of the cops with this car just slams his brakes there, and I’m telling him, I said, ‘He’s going into the fourth-grade building. We need to stop him; we need to do something! We need to do something!’” she told the investigators.
“And he comes out and he’s panicking, too. He’s running back and forth. And I told him, I said that we need to go in. ‘We need to stop him before he goes in,’ I said. And then by the time we knew it, (the shooter) already had made his way into the fourth-grade building. And all you heard, it was just shot, shot, shots.”
Video, radio traffic and Gonzales’ interview indicate he did not enter the building immediately by himself. He said he saw cars arriving from the Uvalde Police Department, where he had served for 10 years before joining the school district police.
He called several times for a unit to give him cover, radio transcripts show. And he tried to warn fellow officers about the danger, he recalled to colleagues soon after the gunman was killed. “I told them to stand back because they were coming in (and) he was shooting out the window,” he said, captured on body camera footage only released in 2025 after a campaign for public records to be made public. At that time, though, the gunman had yet to enter the building. He was shooting from the outside.
Gonzales entered the hallway behind an officer from the Uvalde Police Department at 11:35 a.m., body camera showed, followed shortly after by Arredondo with another officer from the city. More officers approached the classrooms from the other end of the hallway and were shot at by the gunman, surveillance video showed.
All of the officers then pulled back and the shooting stopped.
Asked by the investigators whether anyone said, “we need to find this shooter,” Gonzales replied no.
“It did cross our mind. You know, we just never, nobody ever made, you know, we’re just covering each other,” he said of those moments in the hallway filled with gunsmoke and bullet casings littering the ground. “You know, that’s what, basically, we’re doing.”
Gonzales, then 49, along with another officer, left the building to use their radios because they did not work inside. Gonzales did not go back in until more than an hour later, when the shooter was dead.
Call logs show he requested SWAT be activated at 11:38 a.m., even though waiting for SWAT was discredited as a policy for handling active shooters after the 1999 Columbine school massacre.
Also, local SWAT leader Eduardo Canales, armed with a rifle, was already there. He was the first officer in the hallway from the end opposite Gonzales when they all moved toward the classroom
While he was outside, Gonzales took up a position at the corner of the fourth-grade building, pointing out to arriving officers where the shooter was believed to be.
He asked administrators whether the class of Eva Mireles was in session in room 112, then radioed that children were scheduled to be in there. Still at the corner of the building, he chatted occasionally with a UPD officer, sharing how he saw the coach fall and get up as he arrived, and that Mireles — a possible victim — was the wife of a fellow school police officer, Ruben Ruiz. “Gonna be Ruben’s girl,” he said, showing no apparent urgency to stop the gunman.
Gonzales got a stick to prop open an exterior door for other officers and later helped to evacuate kids from the window of room 102, urging them to “Run! Run!” a review of body camera footage shows.
He said he got master keys from the maintenance supervisor, who would learn later his stepdaughter was among the dead. Gonzales also told investigators he checked on his colleague Ruiz, who had been disarmed by his fellow officers as he tried to move toward the classroom where his wife lay dying.
When the shooter was killed by a team led by Border Patrol agents, Gonzales was one of many responders who surged into the classrooms after the breach, seeing what had been done there. He stayed for several minutes, video shows, holding the door to Mireles’ classroom after the surviving children had been hustled out.
Almost 400 officers from multiple local, state and federal agencies went to Robb Elementary that day. The shooter was killed 77 minutes after he entered the school building.
Gonzales was interviewed by a Texas House investigative committee in the weeks after the shooting. The committee’s report did not note his arrival at the scene. An exhaustive study by the Department of Justice with a minute-by-minute timeline recorded that Gonzales did arrive at Robb at 11:31 a.m. It said, “The officer does not appear to see the subject, who is nearby in between vehicles in the parking lot.” But the report did not mention the coach giving him directions or refer to Gonzales again before he is recorded entering the building.
Gonzales joined the Uvalde school police 10 months before the shooting. The Uvalde school district suspended the entire force’s activities in October 2022 in the wake of CNN reporting that the force had hired a Texas state trooper who was under investigation for her actions during the response to the massacre. The force was later reconstituted with entirely new personnel.
CNN’S EXCLUSIVE REPORTING ON THE UVALDE MASSACRE
Arredondo had been fired three months after the attack. He was charged with 10 counts of child endangerment with known criminal negligence for failing to recognize the incident as an active shooting and for failing to take proper action to intervene, the indictment said. His trial date has not been set. A survey from the Uvalde Leader-News last month found most local responders on the scene that day were still working in law enforcement, some having been promoted or elected to their positions.
Gonzales’ trial will be only the second in the US where a school police officer is prosecuted on charges of criminally failing to protect children in a mass shooting. It follows the 2023 acquittal of Scot Peterson, the school resource officer who remained outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as a teen gunman spent a little over six minutes killing 17 classmates and teachers and wounding 17 more people in February 2018.
Peterson’s attorney at that trial, Mark Eiglarsh, said his client stayed outside because he could not tell where the shots were coming from. Eiglarsh sees parallels between the cases of his client and Gonzales.
“The defense needs to focus on who’s really to blame, which is the shooter — the shooter. We’re here because of that monster and what he did. That needs to be the focus,” he told CNN.
“This case is won or lost in jury selection; it just is,” he said. “You get the right jurors on there who can be fair and open-minded, they can be courageous and look victims in the eyes and say it’s possible that he could have done things differently. It’s possible that he didn’t even get it right. It’s possible that he didn’t do everything he was trained to do, but that doesn’t mean it was criminal.”
Though Eiglarsh did what he called “noble and important work” and won the case for his client, he also said it was the worst time in his career.
“I know what it’s like to walk into a courtroom knowing that people have suffered the worst tragedy, my nightmare, losing children. So, rationality sometimes goes out the window,” he said.
“We just believe that if there’s a guilty verdict, that’s going to make us feel better, and it was so tough every day knowing that in defending someone I believed was innocent, I was depriving the family members who were in the courtroom of something that they wanted. They wanted a guilty verdict.”
He said he felt the loss of the families present in court every day, and tried to embrace it, while not letting his client become a scapegoat.
“You talk about how lives were lost, but we do not do justice for the victims by doing an injustice against the defendant,” he said, choking up as he thought of what lies ahead for the Uvalde families.
Adult survivors of the Uvalde massacre, including teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was taunted by the gunman as he lay in a pool of his own blood, have told CNN they will be called to testify in Corpus Christi.
It is also set to be a chance for Amy Marin-Franco to describe the minutes she spent on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, from calling to report a traffic accident, to alerting that the driver had a gun, that he was firing at her school and then had made it inside the building. She was initially wrongly blamed for leaving a door propped open, allowing the gunman into the fourth-grade wing, even though video shows her pulling it closed.
For her and many others in Uvalde, it has already been more than three-and-a-half years of loss, pain and unanswered questions. The trial will be live-streamed in the middle of winter, but it will take children, teachers, families and responders back to that baking hot day in late spring. It was the last Tuesday of the school year, a day when the work had been done, and awards were given to happy fourth-graders to mark their achievements. Nineteen of those students, and two of their teachers, never got to go home, after a gunman walked — unchallenged — into their school.
