Teacher tells court she saw officer accused of failing to delay Uvalde school massacre: ‘He just stayed there’

By Shimon Prokupecz, Matthew J. Friedman, Rachel Clarke, CNN

(CNN) — A school employee testified Wednesday she saw both a teenage gunman and a police officer responding to an emergency before the 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Melodye Flores, a teaching aide who helped children with special needs, said she ran outside after hearing on her school radio that a man with a gun had come over the fence onto school property.

“That’s when I saw the shooter right there,” she said, pausing for several moments to compose herself.

Flores said she fell and, as she got up, a police vehicle drove up to her. She told the officer two or three times where the shooter was headed.

“I just kept pointing. ‘He’s going in there. He’s going into the fourth-grade building,’” she said of what she shouted.

“He just stayed there,” she said of the officer. “He was pacing back and forth.”

Flores said she could hear shots being fired.

Former school district police officer Adrian Gonzales pleaded not guilty at trial to 29 counts of endangering or abandoning children. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the shooting. Another 10 children were left trapped with the gunman, who spent 77 minutes inside the school before he was killed by law enforcement officers who had stacked up in the hallway outside the classrooms.

The Uvalde massacre remains one of the deadliest US school shootings, a continuing scourge that has spurred security measures in classrooms across America.

Flores is a key witness for the state, providing the only firsthand testimony about what Gonzales did or didn’t do in the first few minutes as the shooting began.

Prosecutors have said Gonzales had time and information — including details from Flores, revealed earlier this month by CNN — that could have allowed him to act. Defense attorneys argue Gonzales did everything he could during the massacre, including entering the fourth-grade building as shots were fired, warning others, getting keys, and rescuing children.

Nico LaHood, representing Gonzales, questioned Flores about inconsistencies in her statements, including descriptions of the officer and his patrol car that do not match Gonzales or his vehicle.

He suggested she may have misremembered or misunderstood other aspects of what she experienced.

“There’s a lot going on in your mind at that time, right?” LaHood said to Flores.

“You testified that (Gonzales) was just kind of pacing back and forth,” he said. “But he was getting out. He’s assessing you because you’re yelling things at him, right?”

He continued about Gonzales’ actions: “Could that be that he was going behind the vehicle to get behind it?”

Flores said she was unsure what Gonzales was doing.

She agreed with LaHood that she first spoke to investigators one week after the tragedy, during which time she had seen videos and reports about what happened.

The key interaction between the teacher and officer was described at the start of the seventh day of Gonzales’ trial. On Tuesday, surviving teachers gave harrowing accounts of what happened, and a father who is a sheriff’s deputy for a neighboring county described his fear for his daughter and how he joined the team that eventually killed the gunman. Emotions spilled over in the public gallery when the sister of one of the teachers killed screamed out. The jury also heard Gonzales describe his actions in a video interview with investigators the day after the attack.

The-CNN-Wire
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