In May 2022 a teenager entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and opened fire before barricading himself in a classroom with his victims. Bodycam footage shows police officers lingering in the hallway trying to figure out which room he was in. A ten-year-old girl called 911 and gave the room number where she was hiding: "Please hurry, there's lots of dead bodies. I can't wait." The children armed themselves with arts-and-crafts scissors and sat in silence. By the time the cops breached the classroom and killed the gunman, 19 children and two teachers were dead. It took them 77 minutes. Nearly 400 officers responded to the emergency.
On January 5th 2026 the state of Texas put Adrian Gonzales, one of the first officers to arrive at the school, on trial. He is charged with 29 counts of child endangerment—a crime of omission, for failing to stop the tragedy. The case is highly unusual. "Criminal law generally punishes people for what they do, not what they don't do," says Joshua Dressler, a law professor at Ohio State University. The state must prove that Gonzales "intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence, by act or omission, engage[d] in conduct that place[d] a child…in imminent danger".
In American law three categories of people have some kind of duty to act: parents, spouses and law-enforcement officers. But typical defendants charged under such statutes are more glaringly responsible—a parent who chronically starves an infant, for example. Prosecutors argued that Gonzales's decade on the force and his recent active-shooter training obliged him to rush the building. Defence lawyers counter that the gunman had a rapid-fire AR-15 assault rifle and that confronting him meant certain death: "He's going to take us out like butter," one officer said at the time. Texas law requires police to "preserve the peace" within their jurisdictions but does not require "doing a suicide mission", says Zachary D. Kaufman, a law professor at the University of Florida.
The Supreme Court ruled in DeShaney v Winnebago County (late 1980s) that a state agency that failed to prevent child abuse could not be held liable in civil court. In Town of Castle Rock v Gonzales (2005) it ruled that a local police force has no constitutional duty to protect private citizens from harms it does not create. The most analogous criminal case involved a security guard who failed to stop a shooter from killing more than a dozen people at a high school in Parkland, Florida; that prosecution ended in a full acquittal in June 2023.
The trial is taking place in Corpus Christi, a three-hour drive south-east of Uvalde.
One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you.