Uvalde cop's defense focuses on 'fatal funnel' and other officers' actions as trial enters third week
The sister of one of two teachers murdered in the 2022 school shooting was removed from the courtroom last week after yelling that her sister "went into the fatal funnel. Not you!"
The second week of trial in the child endangerment case against former Uvalde, Texas, school police officer included testimony from teachers and parents as well as a former police sergeant who said he ignored a request from an officer for “permission to fire.”
Daniel Coronado testified he didn’t answer because he doesn’t know why an officer would think he needed to seek permission to use deadly force.
“When that request came to you, did that seem odd to you?” Prosecutor Bill Turner asked in direct-examination.
“It did seem odd to me, yes, sir,” answered Coronado, who’s retired from the Uvalde Police Department.
“Explain that to the jury,” Turner said.
“Well, typically, when you’re being shot at … if you do see an individual with a gun, I’ve never been asked or have ever heard of anyone asking for permission to fire,” Coronado testified. “I don’t know what he was thinking or what, why he said that.”
Coronado said he couldn’t see Officer Juan Saucedo’s “backdrop,” and Turner asked, “Would it have been irresponsible for you to give him direction not knowing the specifics of his backdrop?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Coronado answered.
Coronado said it happened “within one or two or three seconds.”
“I was trying to comprehend what was going on. I was getting a lot of information. I was trying to determine where this guy was. And in the middle of all that, he says, ‘I think I see him. Permission to fire.’ … Then at that point that I heard the individuals yelling, ‘He’s going towards the school.’ and I left and drove towards the front of the school. Does that make sense?” Coronado testified.
“Yes, sir,” said Turner, a longtime district attorney in Brazos County, Texas, who was appointed to the investigation into the police response to the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
Turner and Christina Mitchell, the district attorney for Uvalde and Real counties, are prosecuting Adrian Gonzales, a former officer with the Uvalde school district police department, as well as Pete Arredondo, the former school police chief who is scheduled for trial after Gonzales.
Gonzales is charged with 29 counts of child endangerment or abandonment under Texas state law, one count for each of the 19 children who were murdered and 10 who were injured by the 18-year-old gunman, who was killed when law enforcement eventually breached a classroom door. Arredondo is charged with 10 counts, one for each injured child.
The prosecution argues that because Gonzales was one of the first officers at the school and heard the gunman firing outside, his failure to follow active shooter training, which calls for immediate engagement, endangered each child in the two adjoining classrooms where the victims were shot. The case against Arredondo alleges his decisions as incident commander prolonged the danger for the children who survived the gunfire and were calling for help.
In trial, Gonzales’ lawyers have said he responded as best he could based on the information he had at the time. They’re trying to refute prosecutors’ argument that he missed a chance to stop the gunman from going into the school, and they’re comparing his actions to the actions of other officers such as Coronado, who has not been charged with a crime.
In cross-examination last week, Coronado told Gonzales’ lawyer Nico LaHood he doesn’t know who Officer Saucedo saw “or what he saw” before Saucedo asked permission to fire. Coronado also testified he “never saw anyone that was a suspect.”
“I never saw anyone with a gun. I never saw him enter the school. I never saw any of that,” Coronado said.
On Friday, LaHood questioned Lt. Nick Hill of the Texas Department of Public Safety about Coronado ignoring Saucedo’s “permission to fire” request. Hill testified that while Texas law doesn’t require law enforcement officials to seek permission from another officer or supervisor before using force, “departmental policies may be different.”
Hill testified about an animated map of the school that depicts the gunman’s movements as well as the movements of law enforcement, which jurors saw during his direct-exam.
When LaHood questioned him about it in cross, Hill said “it’s possible” that Gonzales didn’t know the gunman had entered the building. (Jurors, though, heard testimony earlier in the week from a former school aide who said she told Gonzales the gunman needed to be stopped before he went into the building and pointed him out, but Gonzales “did nothing.”)
LaHood continued: “Somebody not Adrian said, ‘I think he made it in the building,’ and you know that was Coronado, right?”
“Yes,” Hill answered.
“And so as that’s happening, even though there’s knowledge that this shooter made into the building, these three officers do not pursue the shooter,” LaHood said.
“They all three relocate to the other intersection. They do not pursue the shooter, not through the west door,” Hill testified. Pointing at the map of the school, Hill said the officers, “with Sgt. Coronado leading, follow and drive up here and take up different positions.”
Hill said Gonzales heard the initial shots because he “gets on the radio and says, ‘Shots fired.’”
“He has now clarified he heard something. He understands that shots are being fired because he put it out over the radio,” Hill testified.
LaHood questioned Hill for about 2 1/2 hours on Friday and will continue Tuesday.
Based in San Antonio, the former elected district attorney of Bexar County took an aggressive tone with Hill as he questioned him about the actions — or inactions — of others and the idea that Gonzales should have been able to discern the direction of the gunfire despite possible gunshot echoes.
Hill testified he’s determined the location of echoing gunfire several times in his career, and LaHood said, “I don’t know if anybody believes you.” Turner objected and LaHood said, “He’s right. I sustain myself.”
LaHood referenced a street on a map of the school and an officer standing around when he told Hill, “You can smile all you want. He’s standing around, right? What was funny about what I said right there? Why did you smile?”
Judge Sid Harle sustained Turner’s argumentative objection, but Hill still answered, “I was merely just licking my lips because my mouth is dry.”
“Okay, get some water, please. You have a lot of water there,” LaHood said.
Judge Harle sustained Turner’s objection “to the sidebar comment.”
LaHood and Hill disagreed on whether Coronado and the two officers were driving away or repositioning themselves as a tactical decision.
Hill testified he can’t say if their actions were helping the children.
“Hold on. Look at this jury. Tell them you can’t answer that question,” LaHood said. “You can’t answer that question? Whether them driving away was helping those children? Answer that question.”
Hill said Sgt. Coronado said “I think” the gunman made into the building so “it’s possible when he gets here, he doesn’t see the shooter and is letting him know ‘I don’t see them on that side of the building, and he may have made it into the building.’”
“But these guys don’t run to the building. They drive around it, right?” LaHood asked.
“They move to another area,” Hill began before LaHood interjected and referenced Hill’s testimony about locating echoing gunfire.
“You have great hearing. You can tell where gunfire is. Listen to my question,” LaHood said.
Turner objected to the question as argumentative, and LaHood said “sustained” before Judge Harle did.
“I’m sorry, judge,” LaHood said.
Week 2 witnesses:
In addition to Coronado and Hill, the witnesses who testified in the second week of trial were:
Terry Snyder, a ranger with the Texas Department of Public Safety since 1998 who was assigned to help identify and mark the bodies of victims.
Scott Swick, a ranger who searched classroom 112, which connected to 111. Those are the classrooms where the victims were killed. Jurors saw photos from the classroom during his testimony; most weren’t shown on the live stream because they show blood or are otherwise too graphic. Evidence in the room indicated the gunman reloaded at least once: Swick testified more than 30 bullet casings were recovered, “which would indicate to me that a magazine had been changed in the room.”
Roberto Montalvo Jr., a ranger who went to the hospital where some victims. Two of the 19 children were hospitalized before they were pronounced dead. Montalvo also returned to the school one week after the shooting to collect additional prices of evidence, including a Hellfire trigger snap-on device and two spent cartridge casings. He returned again a week later to “collect two spent cartridge casings on the outside of the west side of the building of Robb Elementary, and some projectile fragments now were in room that came from room 111.”
Turner’s direct-exam was about 13 minutes, but Montalvo’s testimony took about 75 minutes because Gonzales’ lawyer Jason Goss asked many questions about the gunman’s movements and the location of shell casings
In re-direct, Montalvo testified that the “ideal situation” for Gonzales based on his training would be to “isolate the individual to a certain part of the building, or to even isolate him to outside the building and have the shooting outside.”
“You have any indication that he isolated, distracted, or neutralized the gunman?” Turner asked.
“In this case, it doesn’t appear like that,” Montalvo answered.
Arnulfo Reyes, a fourth grade teacher who was shot and injured before the gunman shot his students.
None of Reyes’ students survived, but he lived by playing dead, surviving his initial gunshot wounds and a gunshot wound to his back that the murderer inflicted near the end of the carnage.
Reyes said he was grading papers as students watched a movie when he heard loud sounds in the adjoining room 112 and saw pieces of the wall “or some objects flying.” His students moved to hide under tables “and I got off from my my desk area and was going around to hide from view.”
“That is when I looked at my door, and that’s where I saw him,” Reyes testified.
“What did you see?” Turner asked.
“A black shadow,” Reyes answered.
“And what was the black shadow doing?” Turner asked.
“The black shadow was holding a gun. And I know that he was holding a gun because I just saw the fire come out of the gun,” Reyes answered.
Reyes said the gunman shot one of his arms “and that’s when I fell to the ground.”
“And then after I fell on to the ground, he came around and he shot the kids,” Reyes testified.
Reyes testified he heard a voice in room 112 say, “Officer, come in here. We’re in here,” and the gunman “walks over there, and then I heard more shooting.”
“And did you hear that voice again?” Turner asked.
“No,” Reyes answered.
The gunman approached him again as he pretended to be dead and “tried to taunt me” when “he got some of my blood and splashed it on my face,” Reyes testified.
He said he doesn’t know how long it took for police to remove him from the classroom but “it felt like forever.”
When he heard them approaching he prayed and “just, you know, I gave myself to the Lord and just closed my eyes real tight and just waited for for everything to be over,” Reyes testified.
Turner ended his exam by displaying the school photographs of each child was killed or injured and having Reyes state their names and whether they survived.
Jimmy Klaevemann, a retired electronics technician and security coordinator for the Uvalde school district who testified about the school’s surveillance system. He confirmed the cameras’ functionality on May 24, 2022, and said all footage was provided to investigators.
Elsa Avila, a fourth grade teacher who was shot and injured but survived along with each of her students, who were not physically injured.
She realized something was wrong when one of her students told her another teacher’s students were screaming and running into their classroom. She closed the classroom door and turned off the lights, “but as soon as we started moving, we heard shots. We heard loud, loud shots.”
“They knew that it was, you know, a real thing. … It was not a drill, that it was something real, because they could hear the shots being fired,” Avila testified.
Avila realized she was shot because “I put my hand on my side, and I saw blood.”
“When I took my hand away, I saw blood, so I knew that I had been shot,” she testified. “I fell to the floor, and we kept hearing the shots. They were just going like that, just one after the other, one after the other, and it would stop.”
“I texted my principal. I texted the counselor. I texted some of my teacher friends on a teacher group that we had to let them know. You know, I’m shot. I need help. Send help.”
She said “it seemed forever” before police “busted through the windows” and said, “police, we’re here to help you.”
“The glass flew everywhere, and the students let out a collective cry. … I mean, they all just cried at the same time because they’d been holding it in for so long. And some of them ran, ran to the window right away.”
Avila testified she was “trying to hold in the pain.”
“I was in so much pain towards the end there. My body was .. going into shock, because my legs were already starting to shake, my whole body was starting to shake. … I kept praying, God, please don’t let me die,” she said, crying. She wept as she said she couldn’t help her students or comfort them and she was worried she’d “die in front of them.”
She said she was “very very proud of them becuase they did everything they were supposed to do.”
“They took care of each other. They tried to take care of me,” Avila said. She retired after the shooting, but she returned to the classroom this year after counseling and therapy because she missed it so much.
“Thank God I’m back in the classroom,” she said.
Erin Robin, a second-grade teacher who testified about hiding with her students after she heard from a school aide who “was very panicked” and said, “There’s a man with a gun.” She “made sure that the door was shut and locked” by removing a magnet that she and other teachers used to keep the door unlocked at all times “because kids go in and out to the bathroom all day long, or people, counselors.”
Her students “got underneath the table” and she “sat down beside them.” At one point she looked out a window and saw an officer, apparently Gonzales, at his police car.
“My first thought was ‘the good guys are here. The police are here. We’re going to be okay,” Robin said. She said she told her students, “It’s going to be okay. The police are here.”
Joe Vasquez, a deputy with the sheriff’s office in Zavala County, Texas, who was off duty when he went to the school after hearing about the gunman. His daughter, Ava, attended the school, and Vasquez didn’t know where she was when he linked up with other officers and entered the school, eventually joining the team that breached the classroom door and killed the gunman.
“I thought they were going to have some kind of equipment to breach the door, which they didn’t. I remember asking about a sledgehammer,” Vasquez testified.
He said it dark and “hard to see” when he heard “ a door creak open in front.”
“And then the shooting starts,” Vasquez testified. “I could hear the shots coming. I’m carrying my rifle left handed so I can’t even pick it up because we’re so close together. Eventually, I transitioned to the right, fire a couple rounds and it jams.”
After the gunfire ends, “in front of me, there’s someone with long hair, face down.”
“I thought it was a teacher at first because he had long hair. They flip him over, and I could tell it was the shooter. He’s in all black,” Vasquez testified.
He said he realized his daughter wasn’t in the classroom when he saw a boy and realized he was older than her. He eventually found his daughter at the Civic Center. He initially didn’t see her and “it feels everything leaves in my body, and then out of nowhere, she like appears, and I hug her.”
“We go towards a back wall, and then a teacher, but I don’t know if it was a teacher, but she kicks me out of there because I have a rifle,” Vasquez testified.
LaHood’s cross-examination focused on the danger law enforcement faced and the concept of a fatal funnel, which is a law enforcement term for a narrow, exposed space that heightens the potential for a deadly attack.
A fatal funnel is “where you’re gonna die at the door,” Vasquez testified. In the Uvalde shooting, two officers were shot as they tried to approach the classroom with three other officers, including Gonzales.
If the threat has a high-powered rifle and ammo, “it doesn’t matter if there’s 1,000 officers on that side, right? I mean, if you have enough rounds, they’re just going to pick them off as they come in, correct?” LaHood asked.
“Yes,” Vasquez answered.
After Vasquez’s testimony while the jury was still seated, Velma Lisa Duran, the sister of slain teacher Irma Garcia, stood in the galley and that her sister “went into the fatal funnel.”
“You know who went into the fatal funnel? My sister went into the fatal funnel!” Duran yelled.
“She went into the fatal funnel! She did it! Not you, bastard!” she continued as deputies removed her from the courtroom. Judge Harle said she’s prohibited from reentering the courtroom for the remainder of trial. He also instructed jurors to disregard her comments.
Garcia, 48, was in her 23rd year of teaching and was co-teaching a fourth grade class with Eva Mireles, who also was murdered. Garcia’s husband, Joe, died of a heart attack two days after she was killed.
Teresa Zamarripa, an office manager at Southwest Texas College Law Enforcement Academy who testified about Gonzales’ training and his work teaching classes about how to response to active shooters.
Gonzales completed an eight-hour training course on active shooters in December 2021. He also has 60 hours of training in special weapons and tactics.
Ricardo Guajardo, a Texas ranger who interviewed Gonzales one day after the shooting. Turner played video fo the interview in direct-exam and paused periodically to ask Guajardo questions.
Gonzales told Guajardo he tried to console his colleague Officer Ruben Ruiz, who was married to Mireles and said she’d called and told him she was dying inside her classroom.
“I went and checked on Officer Ruben Ruiz, because he told us that his wife called him, Ms. Mireles, and that she, she was hit, and she, she was dying,” Gonzales, dressed in his school district police uniform, told Guajardo.
“You went to go check on, check on him?” Guajardo asked.
“He was sitting in there with lieutenant. I was trying to, you know, calm him down,” Gonzales said. “He wanted to go in ... after he received that phone call, so they actually had to take his gun away and sit him down.”
Gonzales told Guajardo at the end of the interview, “Now that I can sit back, I went tunnel vision.”
“It'‘s just the adrenaline rush going and, you know, shots fired and stuff like that. So it was just, you know, because on the radio it said there was a lady shot in the head on Dia Street, which is two blocks down,” Gonzales said. The woman was the gunman’s grandmother, whom he shot before he went to the school.
Melodye Flores, a school district aide who testified she told Gonzales about the gunman before he entered the building but Gonzales “did nothing.” Turner mentioned Flores expected testimony in his openings statement.
In direct-exam with Turner on Wednesday (Jan. 14), Flores described her efforts to ensure students were safe, including running outside to gather students and teachers and attempting to lock doors. She saw the shooter near the fourth-grade building and heard gunshots.
She told Gonzales that the gunman “needed to get stopped before he went into the fourth grade. That we needed just to stop him.”
“He did nothing,” Flores answered.
Flores said she “just kept pointing.”
“He’s going in there. He’s going to the fourth grade building,” she recalled saying.
“And how many times did you say that?” Turner asked.
“I would say a couple of times,” Flores testified.
Cherie Hauptmeier, a doctor who treated children at Uvalde Memorial Hospital and testified about their injuries, including significant shrapnel and gunshot wounds. She explained the triage process and the prioritization of victims in critical condition. She said she learned of the shooting when she received a text message sent to all physicians asking them to report to the emergency room immediately.
Jamie Torres, whose daughter, Chloe, is one of the 10 children who made it out of the classrooms alive but injured.
Torres testified she received a text message from the school about a lockdown before she learned the situation was much more serious. She saw her daughter “after she came home from the hospital, because I was out of town” and she “had bullet fragments in her forehead and in her left thigh” that remain today.
“She gets headaches frequently, and then in her leg, if she walks kind of far, sometimes she'll say that she has to stop because her leg was hurt,” Torres testified.
Jennifer Haby, a licensed counselor at the Bluebonnet Children’s Advocacy in Hondo, Texas, who was deemed a court-qualified expert on post-traumatic stress disorder. She testified PTSD and how to treat it.
Michael Witzgall, retired law enforcement and military instructor who taught a course with Gonzales on how to respond to active shooters. Witzgall, who was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps' elite reconnaissance unit, testified as a court-qualified expert in law enforcement training and procedures.
“When there’s an active shooter, we cannot sit around and wait. And most of law enforcement from the day you are in the academy, they tell you, never do anything by yourself. … Yet, in an active shooter situation, because of the lethality, the nature of the whole thing we have to act, which can mean acting completely and wholly alone.”
Christopher Salinas, whose son Samuel survived the shooting with a gunshot wound to his left thigh. The boy has shrapnel and bullet fragments in his right thigh that severely limits his activities.
“He can walk very limited. He has pain all the time on his right thigh, so he puts more weight on his left,” Salinas testified. “He complains a lot of pain through any exercise, activities, walking, running. He’ll do it, but then the next day, he can’t get up or walk or anything, because the pain is so severe for him.”
He said his son’s trauma is provoke by “popping sounds, slamming doors, loud arguments … violence on TV, things of that nature.” He also doesn’t like the color red because “I think it’s just a picture of what he saw.”
Salinas said the boy has disassociated from some family members and grown particularly attached to his oldest brother.
“Now, Mr. Salinas, is the child that you picked it from the hospital on May 24 the same child that was taken to school that day?” Mitchell asked.
“No,” Salinas answered.
Mercedes Salas, who taught the gunman when he was in fourth grade and heard him pound on her locked door as she hid with her students.
Salas testified she ensured her door was locked after she heard gunshots. (She didn’t use a magnet to stop the lock like other teachers.) She told her students to hide quietly and pray.
“My kids were sitting down, except for one student. One student was standing … and I grabbed him, and I just went down with him like that. And as soon as I did that, I heard a gunshot inside the, in the hallway.”
“When I heard the gunshot in the hallway, I immediately texted my my family and I said, ‘Gunshots in the hallway. Pray for us,’” Salas testified.
Before the gunfire in the nearby classrooms, “I heard pounding like if somebody was pounding on my door, like the rattle of my doorknob.”
“I started praying. I was talking to God like, ‘Protect my door.’ And after that, then I heard a lot of gunshots,” she said. “I heard kids screaming. When they screamed, I heard the gunshots then I didn’t hear them anymore, so I knew something happened to them.
“What did you tell your children to do at this point?” Mitchell asked.
“I just told them to keep on praying,” she said.
Salas, who also goes by Ellis, recalled how one boy showed her a pair of scisssors as they hid from the gunman.
“One of my students said, ‘Mrs. Ellis,’ .... I looked, and he had a pair of scissors. I didn’t tell him to put them away, because those scissors made him feel safe,” she testified.
Salas said she was the last person to leave the classroom because “when my last kiddo got out, I turned back and I started walking back to my classroom … because I had to make sure nobody stayed frozen.”
Salas said her students “were so brave being so close to danger. They listened to my instructions to survive. I was very proud of them.”
Ruby Gonzales, an officer with the Uvalde Police Department who was working for the school district police department when the shooting occurred. Gonzalez testified she took a course that Gonzales co-taught on how to respond to active shooters.
She went into the fourth grade building but not the hallway because “just the amount of police cars and things that I saw outside, I felt like if I was to have gone in there, I would have just taken up more space.”
Gonzalez said another officer told her to help keep parents and neighbors “at a safe distance.”
“Did that take a significant number of officers to do crowd control?” Turner asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gonzalez answered.
“And you joined in on that?” Turner asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gonzalez answered.
She testified in cross-exam that she heard Sgt. Coronado, not Gonzales, say shots fired, but she corrected herself in re-direct.
“And who was it that you heard say ‘shots fired’?” Turner asked.
“This time, Officer Adrian Gonzales,” Gonzalez answered.
“Not Coronado, but Adrian Gonzales?” Turner asked.
“Yes, sir, absolutely,” Gonzalez answered.
LaHood followed up in re-cross.
“So when I was asking that question, you were mistaken. I was right when I said it was Mr. Gonzales, right?” LaHood asked.
“Yes,” Gonzalez answered.
Myra Landry, a 911 communication supervisor at the Uvalde Police Department who testified about the dispatch, which handles calls for 17 agencies, and responding to a subpoena for all 911 and dispatch calls related to the shooting.
Cody Allen, a Texas ranger who testified about an animated map reconstruction of the school and everyone’s movements.
Allen provided specific measurements from the school, including a 46-yard walkway to the south door and a 66-yard distance from the patrol car to the south door.
Allen testified on Friday before Hill. Coronado testified all of Thursday.
LaHood will continue cross-examining Hill on Tuesday at 9 a.m. at the Nueces County Courthouse in Corpus Christie, Texas. That’s central time.
I’ll stream live on my YouTube channel (see below) and post full testimony videos and highlight clips on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
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