Texas v. Adrian Gonzales

The judge called her back to the bench. Not to the witness stand. To the bench.

Stephanie Hail had just finished testifying about the worst day of her life. She was a fourth grade teacher at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022. She heard the gunshots. She grabbed her students. She ran them into a second grade classroom and huddled on the floor, teaching terrified seven and eight year olds breathing techniques to keep them quiet while a mass murderer stalked the hallways.

She survived. Her students survived. And now, more than three years later, she had come to a courtroom in Corpus Christi to tell a jury what she saw that day.

But something had gone wrong. Not with her testimony. With the prosecution.

Judge Sid Harle looked at her and said words that will echo through this case: "You did absolutely nothing wrong. It is not on you."

Then he told her something else. He shared that he and his wife had once been hit by a drunk driver. He spent two months in the hospital. They almost lost him in the emergency room. And every time he thinks about that truck coming at them, he remembers it a little differently. Because that's what trauma does. That's what stress does to memory.

He was preparing her for what was about to happen.

When the jury came back into the courtroom, the judge gave them an instruction that changed everything about Day 2 of this trial. He told them to disregard Stephanie Hail's testimony in its entirety. Every word she said. Everything she described about that terrible morning. The jury cannot consider any of it.

Not because she lied. Not because she did anything wrong. But because the prosecution failed to turn over critical evidence to the defense before trial.

This is called a Brady violation. It comes from a 1963 Supreme Court case that established one of the most fundamental rules in American criminal law: prosecutors must share evidence with the defense. All of it. The good stuff. The bad stuff. The stuff that might help the defendant. The Constitution requires it.

And on Day 2 of the first criminal trial arising from the Uvalde school shooting, the prosecution got caught violating that rule.

Welcome to Texas v. Adrian Gonzales. This is what watching the system looks like.

My father spent 23 years as a criminal defense attorney in West Virginia. He was twice prosecuted by the system he challenged. First for refusing to violate attorney-client privilege. Later for helping people understand their constitutional rights from a coffee shop. The system convicted him both times.

He taught me that constitutional protections matter most in cases where emotions run highest. When the crime is horrific. When the victims are children. When the public demands someone pay. That's exactly when we have to watch most carefully to make sure the system follows its own rules.

Today I'm going to show you what happened on Day 2 of this trial. I'm going to break down seven witnesses. I'm going to explain why the prosecution's own witnesses keep accidentally helping the defense. And I'm going to ask you to think carefully about what accountability really means when the system that failed to protect 21 people can't even follow the rules in the trial meant to hold someone accountable.

Because here's what Day 2 revealed: the failures that allowed children to die on May 24, 2022, didn't end that day. They're still happening. Right now. In this courtroom.

The defense called it being "gas lit" when the prosecutor tried to downplay what had happened. The judge called it a failure that put the defendant's due process rights at risk. And in a trial about whether one officer failed to act, the system itself is showing us exactly what failure looks like.

Let's walk through what happened.

Before we get to the testimony, I want to set the scene. Corpus Christi is about 200 miles from Uvalde. The trial was moved here because the defendant couldn't get a fair trial in a community where everyone knows someone who lost a child. The jury, 11 women and 5 men, was seated after careful selection. They've sworn an oath to presume Adrian Gonzales innocent and to convict him only if the prosecution proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

That burden matters. Beyond a reasonable doubt is the highest standard in American law. Not preponderance of the evidence. Not clear and convincing evidence. Beyond a reasonable doubt. The framers of our Constitution chose that standard deliberately. They understood that the power to take away someone's freedom is the most serious thing a government can do, and they wanted to make sure the government had to be absolutely certain before doing it.

Adrian Gonzales has been charged with 29 counts of child endangerment. If convicted on all counts with maximum consecutive sentences, he could face up to 58 years in prison. But he's also a man who has not been convicted of anything. Not yet. That presumption of innocence stays with him until the prosecution meets its burden.

With that framework in mind, let's talk about what the prosecution did on Day 2.

The day began with Stephanie Hail still on the witness stand. She had started her testimony on Day 1, and the defense was conducting cross-examination when Day 2 began. Defense attorney Nico LaHood played her recorded statement to the Texas Rangers, taken four days after the shooting.

What emerged was a discrepancy. A significant one.

In her original statement, Hail had described hearing gunshots and running for cover. In December, during preparation for trial, she told prosecutors something new: that she had seen a man matching the description of the shooter, with a gun, heading toward the school.

That information was never turned over to the defense.

Look, I want to be clear about something. Stephanie Hail is not the villain of this story. She lived through something no human being should have to experience. She protected children while a mass murderer was in her school. The fact that her memory evolved over time, that she remembered details later that she didn't mention four days after the trauma, is completely normal. The judge said as much when he talked about his own car accident.

The problem isn't with her. The problem is with what the prosecution did with that information.

When a witness tells prosecutors something new, something that wasn't in the original statements, there's a legal obligation to share it with the defense. This isn't optional. This isn't a technicality. This is bedrock constitutional law. The defense has to know what witnesses are going to say so they can investigate, prepare, and mount an effective defense.

The prosecution's explanation? They didn't think it was significant because they already had photographs of the shooter in black clothing.

The defense wasn't buying it. LaHood told the judge he felt like he was being "gas lit." The issue wasn't the color of the shooter's clothes. The issue was that a witness was now claiming she saw a man with a gun heading toward the school. That changes the entire picture of what information was available in those critical first moments.

The judge agreed with the defense. He had seen an ex parte brief from LaHood outlining the defense strategy and how this undisclosed evidence affected their preparation. And he made a ruling that will shape the rest of this trial.

Every word Stephanie Hail said on that witness stand? Gone. The jury has been instructed to pretend they never heard any of it.

Think about what that means. A survivor of the Uvalde shooting came to court to describe what she experienced. She was brave enough to relive the worst day of her life in front of strangers. And because the prosecution didn't follow the rules, none of it counts.

That's what a Brady violation does. It doesn't just affect the defendant. It affects everyone. The witness who testified for nothing. The families who wanted her story heard. The jury who now has to pretend they have amnesia about everything she said.

After Hail was dismissed, the prosecution called its next witness: Amy Franco Marin.

Marin had worked at Robb Elementary for 25 years across different campuses, but she had only been at Robb for about a month when the shooting happened. She was the ACE coordinator, running the after-school program for about 150 children.

On the morning of May 24, 2022, she arrived early because her grandson, a second grader, had an awards ceremony. After the ceremony ended around 9:30 a.m., she stayed at the school to plan an end-of-year celebration dance for the students.

A colleague, Gabriel Gonzalez, was supposed to pick up groceries for the celebration. He texted her around 11:20 a.m. asking her to unlock the back gate so he could bring the groceries through the rear of the campus instead of carrying everything from the front.

So Marin grabbed a cart, propped open her classroom door with a rock, and walked to the northwest gate on Geraldine Street. The gate was always locked. She had trouble with it before, but that day she managed to unlock it. She pushed the cart against the gate and waited.

She was facing east, waiting for Gonzalez to arrive, when she heard a loud vehicle coming from behind her. From the west.

She turned around and saw a truck going fast. She watched it crash into the area by the ditch. The truck hit something, went up, and landed in the ditch.

Then she saw a man get out. He was carrying something. A rifle.

Marin ran back to her classroom door. She was on the phone with 911, screaming for other teachers to get in their classrooms. She saw the man jump the perimeter fence. She watched him walk toward the school, shooting at the windows on the south side of the building as he approached.

She kept screaming for teachers to lock down. Then she heard him enter the building through the west side door.

But here's what stopped me cold during cross-examination. Defense attorney LaHood asked Marin about that west side door. The one the shooter used to enter the building.

She had assumed it was locked. She fully believed it was locked. Policy required it to be locked at all times.

It wasn't.

She didn't find out until about a year later that the door had been unlocked. LaHood made a point of telling her directly: that's not your fault. You didn't unlock that door. You were treating it like it was locked, but it was not locked.

This is one of the systemic failures that predates anything Adrian Gonzales did or didn't do. The door that the shooter used to enter the building was supposed to be locked. It wasn't. And Amy Franco Marin, a woman who had been at that school for a month, had no idea.

LaHood also established that Robb Elementary did not have a full-time officer assigned to it. The school district didn't have enough officers to put one at each school. Marin had been there only a month, so she couldn't speak to whether teachers had complained about this. But the fact remains: there was no dedicated officer at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022.

These aren't details being raised to excuse anyone. They're being raised to show context. To show that when the prosecution charges one officer with child endangerment for failing to stop a shooter, the entire system around that officer had already failed in ways that made his job harder or maybe impossible.

Think about what Amy Franco Marin's testimony actually establishes. A door that was supposed to be locked wasn't. A school that was supposed to have security didn't have a dedicated officer. A woman who had only been there a month was operating under assumptions about safety that turned out to be completely wrong. None of that is Adrian Gonzales's fault. But all of it is part of the picture of what happened that day.

The prosecution wants to isolate Gonzales's actions, or inaction, and judge them in a vacuum. The defense is showing that there was no vacuum. There was a system that had already failed. Security protocols that weren't being followed. Resources that weren't being provided. And into that broken system, officers were called to respond to an active shooter.

This is the context the jury needs to evaluate the charges. Not because it excuses anything. But because you cannot fairly judge one person's split-second decisions without understanding the circumstances in which those decisions were made.

The third witness of the day was Jose Hill, a neighbor who lived right in front of Robb Elementary. His testimony was brief but important.

Hill was getting ready for work in his second-floor bathroom when he heard sounds he initially thought were construction. Like a nail gun. Someone banging on a house. But the sounds kept going, and he started to think they might be gunshots.

He went to his window. At first he saw nothing. Then he looked again and saw someone about to go into the school. He couldn't describe what the person looked like. He didn't remember.

But he did something significant. He took a video on his phone. He recorded about two seconds of the shooter entering the school.

When LaHood asked what the jury would eventually see from that video, Hill said simply: just two seconds of him going into the school.

Hill's testimony matters because it establishes the timeline and the reality of what happened in those chaotic first moments. A civilian neighbor, standing at his window, captured footage of the shooter entering the building. Meanwhile, law enforcement was still trying to figure out what was happening.

The fourth witness was FBI Special Agent Huy Nguyen, and his testimony about shell casings became one of the most important moments of the day.

Nguyen has been with the FBI since 2004. Before that, he spent 10 years as a DNA analyst with the Texas DPS Crime Laboratory. He's a member of the FBI's Evidence Response Team, which processes crime scenes and collects evidence.

His assignment on May 24, 2022, was to document shell casings in the parking lot area on the west side of Robb Elementary. The place where the shooter fired before entering the building.

Nguyen explained the basics of how shell casings work. When a semi-automatic weapon fires, the bullet goes out the barrel and the casing is ejected to the side. For a right-handed weapon, the ejection port is on the right side, so casings typically land to the right of where the shooter is standing.

He found a cluster of rifle casings in the parking lot area. Seven casings total, grouped relatively close together on the south end of the parking lot.

This is where things got interesting.

The prosecution was trying to establish that the shooter fired from the parking lot toward the building. Fine. That's consistent with the evidence. But LaHood took the cross-examination in a different direction.

If casings eject to the right of the shooter, and all the casings were found grouped together in one area, what does that tell us about where the shooter was standing?

Nguyen acknowledged the limitation. He could see where the casings landed. He could see broken windows on the building. But he couldn't say with certainty exactly where the shooter was standing when each round was fired. The casings could have bounced. Rolled. Been kicked by the hundreds of officers who responded to the scene.

But here's the key point LaHood established: there were no casings found on the south side of the building.

If someone had been firing from south of the building, shooting northward, you would expect to find casings to the right of where they were standing. South of the building. There weren't any.

Nguyen agreed. Despite the foot traffic, despite the chaos of 374 officers on scene, despite all the potential contamination, there were still no casings found south of the building.

Why does this matter? Because it goes to what information was available in those critical first moments. Where was the shooter actually firing from? What could officers have known about his position based on the evidence?

The prosecution is arguing that Gonzales should have engaged the shooter. The defense is establishing that the physical evidence tells a specific story about where the shooter was and what direction he was firing. That story matters for evaluating what a responding officer could reasonably have known and done.

The fifth witness was Lynn Deming, a fourth grade STEM teacher who is now at Legacy Elementary, the campus that replaced Robb.

Deming had been at Robb for about six years. Her classroom was room 104, in the fourth grade building on the south end. On May 24, 2022, after the awards ceremony, she had set up stations for her students to play Legos, board games, Minecraft, and art. They were planning to go to recess about ten minutes early because a student who attended half days had just left.

Around 11:20, she was getting her kids ready to go outside. They were walking toward the south door when one of her students said the coach was yelling. Deming didn't know which coach. She heard what sounded like fireworks. She told the kids to get back inside.

They went into lockdown. Lights out. Door locked. Kids hidden in a corner that couldn't be seen from the door window. For hours, those children stayed quiet while terror unfolded in their school.

LaHood's cross-examination focused on the lockdown procedures and school security.

He established that the lockdown training was typically given by school administrators, not police officers. Campus police might sometimes be present, but usually it was just administration going over the procedures.

He confirmed that Robb Elementary did not have a full-time officer assigned to it. There would be officers from the high school who came periodically to check on the elementary school, but no dedicated presence.

He asked about the culture around locked doors. Were teachers ever reprimanded for not having their doors locked? Were there magnets that teachers used to keep doors from locking, to make it easier for substitutes who didn't have keys?

Deming said she knew some teachers had magnets on their doors, though she didn't know if the school had issued them. She herself didn't use one. She didn't really have substitutes because she was "one of those teachers" who didn't call in sick.

Then LaHood got to the evacuation.

When officers finally came to get Deming's class out, they pulled them through the windows and told them to run. That word is important. Run. Not walk. Run. Because the officers pulling them out didn't know if the threat was over.

LaHood asked if Deming knew at the time that the shooter was dead. She didn't. Did she know if he was still alive? No. The urgency of the officers, the instruction to run, all of it suggested the threat wasn't over.

Then came the question that mattered for this defendant.

Did Deming know that one of those officers pulling kids out of the windows was Adrian Gonzales?

She didn't remember any faces. She didn't know who specifically was there. But LaHood had planted the seed: the defendant in this case, the man charged with failing to protect children, was among the officers who evacuated children to safety when they finally got them out.

Deming agreed that whoever those officers were, they were doing a good thing. And Adrian, as one of them, would have been doing a good thing trying to evacuate the kids and teachers from further danger.

The sixth witness was Nicole Ogburn, a co-teacher in room 102 at the south end of the fourth grade building. She had been at Robb for about eight years.

Ogburn's testimony painted a picture of a normal end-of-year celebration day that became a nightmare. After the awards ceremony, she and her co-teacher had put on a movie for the kids. The girls asked to go outside early, but Ogburn looked at her watch and said it was only 11:21. Too early. Too hot. Wait a little bit.

Then she heard what she thought were fireworks or maybe a car backfiring. Then more sounds. Then she realized it was gunfire.

They went into lockdown. Some of her students hadn't made it back to the classroom yet, and she had to make the terrible decision to lock the door anyway. She called 911 and told them there was an active shooter in her building.

LaHood's cross-examination revealed something significant about timing. Ogburn received the lockdown message on her watch around 11:36. The shooter had entered the building at 11:32:58. By the time the official alert went out, he had already been inside for more than three minutes.

LaHood also established the pattern we've seen with other witnesses. No full-time officer assigned to Robb Elementary. A principal had really enforced the locked door policy a few years before, but they hadn't really heard about it recently. The west side door was supposed to be locked, but Ogburn now knows it wasn't.

Ogburn described her 911 call and the terror of those moments. She thought the shooter was in her building. She didn't know at the time that by the time she was on the phone with 911, he had already entered and was already inside classrooms 111 and 112.

Stress does strange things to perception. LaHood introduced the term "perception distortion" to describe how people experience events differently under extreme stress. Ogburn's 911 call, made in absolute terror, contained assumptions and beliefs about where the shooter was that turned out not to match the actual timeline.

That's not a criticism of her. It's a recognition that in chaotic, life-threatening situations, people don't have perfect information. Including police officers.

The final witness of Day 2 was Texas Ranger Kevin Wright, who has been in law enforcement since 1996 and a Ranger since 2010. He was assigned to the state crime scene team and drove to Uvalde from Bernie, a suburb of San Antonio, arriving around 5 or 6 in the evening on May 24.

His first assignment was devastating. He helped identify the victims inside the school.

Most of the identification was visual. Parents had provided photographs of their children from the awards ceremony that morning. The children were wearing the same clothing in the photographs as when they were found. Wright and other Rangers worked until 11 p.m. or midnight that night, identifying the dead so families could be notified.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. The awards ceremony had happened that very morning. Parents took pictures of their children receiving certificates and awards. Those same pictures, taken in celebration, were used hours later to identify bodies. The children were still wearing the same clothes. Still had the same hairstyles. Still looked like the kids their parents had hugged goodbye that morning.

That's the human cost of what happened at Robb Elementary. Not statistics. Not abstract victims. Children whose parents photographed them at an awards ceremony and then had to provide those photographs so that Rangers could identify their bodies.

This testimony matters because it reminds everyone in that courtroom what's actually at stake. Not just legal questions about officer conduct. Not just constitutional issues about Brady violations. Real children. Real families. Real devastation that will never fully heal.

His other assignment was to document bullet trajectories in several classrooms on the west side of the building. He was looking for where bullets came through windows, tracing their paths through ceiling tiles, furniture, and walls.

The evidence he collected showed bullets entering through windows on the west side of the building and traveling into rooms, through walls, and even into the hallway on the opposite side. Some bullets had enough energy after going through a window and a sheetrock wall to penetrate another sheetrock wall across the hallway.

When the prosecutor asked if that would be dangerous to a human being, Wright said yes. Even after going through a window and walls, these bullets were still traveling fast enough to cause harm.

This testimony establishes the danger that existed at Robb Elementary that day. Not just inside the classrooms where the shooter was. In the hallways. Through the walls. Anywhere those bullets could reach.

The court adjourned for the evening with Wright still on the witness stand, to continue his testimony on Day 3.

What the Jury Saw

Put yourself in that jury box for a moment. You've taken an oath to be fair. To listen to the evidence. To presume the defendant innocent unless the prosecution proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

You started Day 2 watching the defense cross-examine a teacher who survived a mass shooting. You watched the lawyers argue outside your presence. You watched the judge excuse the witness. Then you were brought back in and told to forget everything she said.

That instruction is legally required. But juries are made of human beings, and human beings don't have delete buttons in their brains. The judge told them not to speculate about why. Not to wonder about it. Not to hold it against either side. Just follow the instruction.

Can they really do that? Can anyone?

The jury saw something else today too. They saw prosecution witnesses who kept providing testimony that helped the defense.

Amy Franco Marin, called by the state, established that the west side door was supposed to be locked but wasn't. That there was no full-time officer assigned to Robb Elementary. That she had only been there a month and had no idea about any of this.

Lynn Deming, called by the state, established that lockdown training came from administrators not police. That teachers had magnets to keep doors from locking. That there was no dedicated officer at the school. And that Adrian Gonzales was among the officers who evacuated children to safety.

Nicole Ogburn, called by the state, established that the lockdown alert didn't go out until more than three minutes after the shooter entered the building. That she didn't know where the shooter actually was while she was on the phone with 911. That perception under stress is unreliable.

These are prosecution witnesses. The state called them to build its case. And what the jury heard was a pattern of systemic failure that predates anything Adrian Gonzales did or didn't do.

The jury also saw something in the shell casing testimony that matters. FBI Agent Nguyen acknowledged he couldn't pinpoint exactly where the shooter was standing when he fired. He acknowledged that casings can bounce, roll, and be kicked. He acknowledged that with 374 officers on scene, there was foot traffic that could have moved evidence.

But he also acknowledged that no casings were found south of the building. That physical evidence tells a story about where the shooter was and what direction he was firing. That story matters for understanding what information was available to responding officers.

And then there's the Brady violation.

Juries aren't supposed to know about discovery disputes. They're supposed to see finished testimony, not the legal sausage-making that happens behind the scenes. But when a judge instructs them to disregard an entire witness's testimony, they know something went wrong. Even if they don't know exactly what.

The jury went home on Day 2 having been told to forget what a survivor said. Having heard witness after witness describe systemic failures that had nothing to do with the defendant. Having seen the defense establish that their client helped evacuate children while the shooter was still potentially a threat.

What story is the prosecution telling this jury? That one officer failed to act? The jury is seeing evidence that the entire system failed. That doors were unlocked. That there was no dedicated officer at the school. That lockdown alerts came minutes late. That teachers had to figure things out for themselves.

Against that backdrop, the prosecution is asking the jury to hold one man responsible. Whether they can do that will depend on what the prosecution shows in the days ahead. But Day 2 did not help their case. Day 2 raised more questions about the system than it answered about the defendant.

Why This Matters

Brady v. Maryland was decided by the Supreme Court in 1963. The case involved a man named John Brady who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Maryland. His co-defendant had confessed that he, not Brady, had actually done the killing. But the prosecution never told Brady's lawyers about that confession.

The Supreme Court ruled that this violated the Constitution. The prosecution's job isn't just to win. It's to seek justice. And justice requires that the defense have access to evidence that might help them, even if the prosecution doesn't want to share it.

This rule has been the law for more than 60 years. Every prosecutor in America knows it. It's not optional. It's not a suggestion. It's constitutional bedrock.

So what does it mean when a prosecution violates Brady in the first criminal trial arising from the Uvalde school shooting?

It means the system is still failing.

Think about it. Families waited more than three and a half years for someone to be held accountable for what happened to their children. A grand jury finally indicted Adrian Gonzales on 29 counts of child endangerment. The trial was moved 200 miles to Corpus Christi to ensure a fair venue. Twelve jurors and four alternates were carefully selected.

And on Day 2, the prosecution failed to follow basic constitutional rules that every first-year law student learns.

I'm not saying this to defend Adrian Gonzales. I'm saying this because the families of 21 victims deserve better. They deserve a prosecution that follows the rules. They deserve a trial that can't be thrown out on appeal. They deserve competence from the system that is supposed to deliver accountability.

My father was criminally convicted for helping people understand their constitutional rights. He taught me that those rights exist not to protect criminals but to protect everyone. The Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches. The Fifth Amendment protects you from self-incrimination. The Sixth Amendment guarantees you a fair trial with effective assistance of counsel.

Brady v. Maryland is part of that fabric. When prosecutors hide evidence, they're not just cheating. They're corrupting the entire system. They're making it impossible for judges and juries to find the truth. They're creating grounds for appeals that can overturn convictions years later. They're failing victims who deserve real justice, not prosecutorial misconduct dressed up as accountability.

The judge in this case had a choice. He could have declared a mistrial. That would have meant starting over. New jury selection. New trial. More delays for families who have already waited years.

Instead, he chose a different remedy. Strike the witness's testimony entirely. Let the trial continue. Try to protect the defendant's due process rights without starting from scratch.

But here's the problem. That remedy doesn't make the violation disappear. It creates an appellate issue. If Gonzales is convicted, his lawyers will argue that the Brady violation tainted the trial even if the testimony was struck. They'll argue that the jury heard the testimony before it was struck. They'll argue that you can't un-ring a bell.

And they might win that argument. Months or years from now, an appeals court might look at what happened on Day 2 and decide that the remedy wasn't enough. That the conviction has to be overturned. That the whole process has to start again.

That's what Brady violations do. They don't just affect the current trial. They create uncertainty that extends for years. They give defense attorneys ammunition for appeals. They make verdicts unstable.

The families of the Uvalde victims don't need unstable verdicts. They need accountability that sticks. And they're not going to get it from a prosecution that can't follow basic rules.

There's something else that matters here too. This case is unprecedented. No Texas police officer has ever been charged under the child endangerment statute for failing to act during an active shooter event. The prosecution is trying something that has never been done before.

When you're breaking new legal ground, you have to be perfect. You can't afford mistakes. Because every mistake you make gives the defense an argument. Every shortcut you take creates an appellate issue. Every rule you bend or break makes it harder for a conviction to stand.

The prosecution in this case is not being perfect. They're making mistakes that even the judge says put the defendant's due process rights at risk. In a case that will set precedent for how we hold officers accountable for inaction during mass shootings, the prosecution is playing sloppy.

That should concern everyone, regardless of how they feel about Adrian Gonzales.

Let me put this in perspective. The child endangerment statute in Texas prohibits intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence placing a child in imminent danger. The prosecution has to prove that Adrian Gonzales did one of those things. Not that he could have done more. Not that he should have been braver. That he actually endangered children through his actions or inaction.

This is a difficult standard to meet for a law enforcement officer responding to a chaotic emergency. Courts and juries have historically given officers wide latitude in how they respond to dangerous situations. Split-second decisions made under extreme stress have traditionally been evaluated generously. The Parkland acquittal showed how hard it is to get a jury to second-guess an officer's choices during a mass shooting.

The prosecution knew all of this going in. They knew they were attempting something unprecedented. They knew the legal path was difficult. They knew they would face fierce defense attorneys and sympathetic factual arguments. They should have been extra careful. Extra thorough. Extra committed to following every rule perfectly.

Instead, they violated Brady on Day 2.

This isn't about technicalities. This isn't about lawyers playing games. This is about whether the families of 21 victims will get a verdict that can withstand appellate review. This is about whether accountability, if it comes, will actually stick. This is about whether the system can get anything right when it comes to Uvalde.

The Bigger Picture

On May 24, 2022, nearly 400 law enforcement officers from local, state, and federal agencies responded to Robb Elementary School. Body camera footage showed some of them checking their phones. Sanitizing their hands. Retreating from the sound of gunfire. Waiting for instructions that never came.

For 77 minutes, children called 911 from inside classrooms where their teachers lay dead. They whispered into phones, begging for police to come. The police were already there. They just weren't doing anything.

Of those 400 officers, two face criminal charges. Adrian Gonzales and Pete Arredondo, the former school district police chief. That's it. Two people are being asked to bear criminal responsibility for a systemic failure that involved hundreds.

Is that justice? Or is that scapegoating?

I don't know the answer. But I know the question matters.

The families have asked this question repeatedly. If the response was a catastrophic failure at every level, as the Department of Justice concluded, why are only two people being charged? If cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training all contributed to the deaths, why are we only holding two individuals accountable?

Day 2 of this trial didn't answer those questions. But it raised them in stark relief.

The prosecution's own witnesses kept describing systemic failures. Doors that were supposed to be locked but weren't. No full-time officer at the school. Lockdown alerts that came minutes late. Training that was brief and mostly handled by administrators, not law enforcement. Teachers who didn't know if their doors could even lock.

These aren't excuses for Adrian Gonzales. These are facts about the environment in which he was operating. Facts that a jury will have to consider when deciding whether he specifically is guilty of child endangerment.

The prosecution's theory is that Gonzales was the first officer on scene. That he had information about the shooter's location and description. That he had just completed active shooter training that he himself helped teach. That he had every reason to know what to do and didn't do it.

The defense's counter is taking shape. Gonzales was operating in a chaotic situation with imperfect information. The school's security had already failed before he arrived. He made decisions under extreme stress with limited resources. And when the evacuation happened, he was there pulling children out of windows.

Both narratives will continue to develop as the trial proceeds. But Day 2 showed that the defense narrative has evidence to support it. Evidence that the prosecution itself is providing.

There's also the Parkland precedent to consider. In 2023, Scot Peterson, the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, was acquitted of all charges related to his response to that 2018 mass shooting. Peterson had stayed outside the building while 17 people were killed inside. The jury found him not guilty.

That case haunts this one. Prosecutors in Broward County threw everything they had at Peterson. Child neglect charges. Culpable negligence charges. They argued that his duty as the school's only armed protection meant he had to engage the shooter. The jury deliberated for more than 20 hours over four days. They came back not guilty on everything.

Jurors in that case later said they struggled with what Peterson should have done. They struggled with whether his choices, however criticized, rose to the level of criminal conduct. They found that the gap between bad judgment and criminal guilt was too wide to bridge.

The prosecutors in Uvalde have to convince a jury to do what a Florida jury wouldn't do. They have to prove that inaction during an active shooter situation rises to the level of criminal conduct. And they're making that job harder for themselves with Brady violations and witnesses who undermine their case.

But there are differences between Parkland and Uvalde that might matter. Peterson was outside the building when the shooting happened. Gonzales, according to his own statements, entered the hallway. Peterson never got specific information about where the shooter was. Gonzales allegedly received a description of what the shooter was wearing and which direction he was heading. Peterson wasn't a recent active shooter instructor. Gonzales had taught a course called "Stop the Killing: Solo Response to Active Shooter Events" just two months before the massacre.

Will those differences be enough? Will a Texas jury see something the Florida jury didn't? That's what this trial will decide.

The bigger picture is this: accountability for Uvalde, if it comes, will not come easily. The legal path is unprecedented. The factual situation is chaotic. The systemic failures are so widespread that singling out individuals feels incomplete.

And the prosecution, the one entity that is supposed to be building the case for accountability, keeps making unforced errors.

What to Watch For

Texas Ranger Kevin Wright will continue his testimony when court resumes. He was still on the stand when Day 2 ended, discussing bullet trajectories and evidence collection. His testimony will continue to paint a picture of the physical evidence at the scene.

Watch for what the prosecution does with trajectory evidence. If they're trying to establish where the shooter was firing from and what officers could have known, the defense will push back on the limitations of that evidence. Agent Nguyen already acknowledged significant uncertainty about shooter positioning based on shell casings alone.

Watch for more testimony about school security failures. The defense has established a pattern with multiple witnesses: unlocked doors, no dedicated officer, late lockdown alerts, informal training. Every witness who confirms these failures provides context that makes the prosecution's case harder.

Watch for the prosecution to try to tighten its case. They've had a rough first two days. Their first significant witness was struck entirely. Their subsequent witnesses kept providing helpful testimony for the defense. At some point, they need witnesses who clearly and unambiguously support their theory of the case.

Watch for more Brady issues. If the prosecution failed to disclose information from Stephanie Hail, what else might they have failed to disclose? The defense will be looking for any additional discovery problems. The judge has already shown he's willing to impose serious remedies when the prosecution fails to follow the rules.

Watch for the emotional temperature of the courtroom. This is a case about dead children. About a community that was destroyed. About families who have waited years for someone to answer for what happened. Those emotions are present even when they're not being explicitly discussed. They will affect how witnesses testify, how lawyers argue, and how jurors perceive everything they see and hear.

Watch for the defense to keep doing what it's doing. LaHood has been effective at cross-examination. He's been establishing systemic failures. He's been getting prosecution witnesses to say helpful things. He's been planting seeds about Gonzales's role in evacuations. If this continues, the prosecution will have to work harder to build its case.

And watch for the human moments. The judge telling Stephanie Hail she did nothing wrong. Amy Franco Marin learning the door was never locked. The teachers who stayed quiet with their students for hours. This trial is about legal questions, but those legal questions involve real people who lived through real horror.

Watch for how the lawyers handle the emotion in the room. The prosecutors have to present devastating evidence without seeming callous. The defense has to challenge testimony from survivors without seeming cruel. Both sides have to acknowledge the tragedy while still doing their jobs. How they navigate that tension will matter to the jury.

Watch for the burden of proof to become a central issue. The prosecution has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Every piece of evidence that cuts both ways, every witness who provides context for the defense, every uncertainty in the record makes that burden harder to meet. The defense doesn't have to prove Gonzales innocent. They just have to create reasonable doubt. And Day 2 gave them plenty of material to work with.

Finally, watch for the story the prosecution is trying to tell to emerge more clearly. Right now, it's hard to see their narrative through all the complications. They need to show the jury a clear, compelling story of why this one officer is criminally responsible. Until that story takes shape, the defense's counter-narrative of systemic failure will dominate.

This trial is expected to last about two weeks. We're only on Day 2. There's a long way to go. More witnesses. More evidence. More arguments. The picture that's emerging now may change completely as the trial progresses. Or it may solidify. That's what trials do. They reveal truth through process.

But process only works when everyone follows the rules. And on Day 2, the prosecution showed us what happens when they don't.

The system is watching Adrian Gonzales. But through this trial, we're watching the system. And so far, what we're seeing is a system that still doesn't have its act together.