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, 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 US history.

Gonzales buried his head in his hands after the verdict was read, with his lawyers clapping him on the back.

Parents and siblings of the victims appeared stunned by the decision, some wiping away tears, while others stared ahead with blank expressions.

The Corpus Christi jury deliberated for over seven hours before reaching its not guilty verdict on all 29 counts, each of which carried up to two years in prison.

The trial was a rare case of a US police officer being charged with endangering lives by failing to halt a crime.

Defence lawyer Jason Goss told jurors that prosecutors wanted to scapegoat Gonzales for the mistakes of all police officers at the shooting.

“They have decided he has to pay for the pain of that day, and it’s not right,” Goss said in closing arguments.

Gonzales was among the first of more than 400 law enforcement officers to arrive at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022.

Police waited 77 minutes before entering a classroom where the gunman was holed up.

The gunman, a former student at the school, was ultimately shot dead by other officers.

Gonzales was accused of failing to confront the shooter after he arrived at Robb Elementary in his patrol car in response to a report of an active shooter.

“You can’t stand by and allow it to happen,” Special Prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during closing arguments.

Gonzales said he could not see the shooter and denied that he froze during the first chaotic minutes of the incident when the gunman was outside the school.

The nearly three-week trial was held in Corpus Christi, about 175 miles (282 km) southeast of Uvalde, after the defence argued Gonzales could not get a fair trial in the town of around 16,000 in Texas’ Hill Country.

State and federal investigations into the shooting found that officers left the 18-year-old gunman alone inside the classroom with children while weighing how to confront him.

By the time a tactical team led by Border Patrol officers stormed in, the death toll had reached among the worst ever in a country known for high-profile school shootings.

While debate has raged between proponents of gun control measures and those who say such controls violate the constitutional right to bear arms, there remain few restrictions on firearms in the US compared with other industrialised nations.

Former US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in remarks made while presenting the federal report on Uvalde in 2024, said lives would have been saved had the police immediately confronted the gunman.