Editor’s note: Some of the testimony described below is extremely graphic.
(UVALDE, Texas) — As the sound of gunshots got closer to Room 111 in Robb Elementary School, former fourth-grade teacher Arnulfo Reyes testified that all he could do was tell his students to get under their desks, stay quiet and close their eyes.
“I had told them to close their eyes, because I didn’t want them to see if something bad was going to happen,” Reyes testified Monday at the trial of former Uvalde, Texas, school police officer Adrian Gonzales.
Prosecutors allege Gonzales, who is charged with child endangerment, did not follow his training and endangered the 19 students who died and an additional 10 surviving students. Gonzales has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers argue he is being unfairly blamed for a broader law-enforcement failure that day. It took 77 minutes before law enforcement mounted a counterassault to end the May 2022 rampage.
In excruciating detail, Reyes recounted the tragic moments when gunman Salvador Ramos shot and wounded him and shot and killed all 11 children in his classroom.
Reyes said he fell to the ground after he was struck by gunfire. Then, the shooter “came around and he shot the kids,” Reyes testified, maintaining his composure.
After the first series of gunshots, Reyes testified that a student in a nearby classroom mistook Ramos for police.
“A student from that classroom said, ‘Officer, come in here. We’re in here,"” Reyes testified. “And I heard he walked over there, and I heard more shooting.”
As Reyes lay on the ground bleeding from wounds to his arm and back, he said the shooter returned to his classroom and noticed he was still alive.
“He came and he tried to taunt me. He got some of my blood and splashed it on my face,” he said.
Reyes acknowledged that his sense of time from the shooting was unclear.
“I’m not sure how long, I just know it felt like forever,” he said, adding that all he could do in those moments was pray.
“I just closed my eyes real tight and just waited for everything to be over,” he said.
During cross-examination, defense lawyer Nico LaHood tried to deflect some blame from Gonzales, suggesting Reyes was at least partially at fault for leaving his classroom door unlocked the morning of the shooting.
Reyes will be back on the stand on Tuesday.
Though Reyes did not mention Gonzales by name during Monday’s testimony, the former teacher offered the jury one of the most graphic accounts of the shooting.
Former acting Dallas District Attorney Messina Madson told ABC News that prosecutors are likely attempting to use emotional testimony to emphasize the scope of the tragedy and to argue that someone other than the shooter should bear responsibility for the tragedy.
“This is an unusual way to apply this law, and so from an overall point of view of what the district attorney’s office is trying to do is say this is a tragedy,” Madson said. “This is a terrible, horrible thing that happened, and it is so horrible that not only do we have to mourn it, but somebody is criminally responsible, besides the person who pulled the trigger.”
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