Uvalde officer Gonzales may have suffered from ‘tunnel vision,’ defense witness says
A memorial dedicated to the 19 children and two adults murdered on May 24,2022 during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School is seen on January 05, 2026 in Uvalde, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
(CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas) — Former Uvalde, Texas, school police officer Adrian Gonzales could have suffered from “inattentive blindness” and “tunnel vision” when he responded to the Robb Elementary School shooting, a former officer testified for the defense on Tuesday.
Former San Antonio police officer Willie Cantu said the jurors are unlikely to “understand just how bad” the tunnel vision could be during an emergency response.
To describe “inattentive blindness,” Cantu compared the experience to struggling to find your car keys when you are running late for work.
“It’s like when you get stressed. I’m late for work and I need to find my keys to my car. I can’t find my keys, and you have them in your hand,” he said.
Cantu attempted to defend Gonzales’ actions on May 24, 2022 — citing the real-time challenges he faced as one of the first officers to respond — as defense lawyers pushed back on the prosecution’s allegation that Gonzales “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly and with criminal negligence” endangered students.
Cantu also tried to cast doubt on the reliability of teaching aide Melodye Flores, who testified for the prosecution that she tried to warn Gonzales about the location of the shooter.
“No disrespect to Flores at all, she was definitely there, experienced all the trauma that was going on, but people process that type of stuff differently,” Cantu said.
Cantu also attempted to highlight the inaction of other officers, including one who monitored the perimeter of the school when he arrived.
“It really surprised me that he was right there and just pretty much taken, I’d say a tertiary role,” he remarked.
The only other defense witness was Claudia Rodriguez, a secretary at the funeral home that neighbored Robb.
Rodriguez told jurors that she witnessed gunman Salvador Ramos exit his car with a rifle after crashing into a ditch, and she said Ramos ducked behind a nearby parked car when Gonzales drove by him. That move, defense lawyers allege, prevented Gonzales from being able to clearly spot the gunman when he first arrived at the school.
“And at the time you see the white car [driven by Gonzales], you see the figure, kind of ducking down between the cars. Is that how you remember seeing it?” defense attorney Jason Goss asked.
“Yes sir,” Rodriguez replied.
Rodriguez also testified that she tried to warn other arriving officers that the shooter entered the school, but they did not run in to stop him.
“Gilbert [Limones, another funeral home employee,] and I are yelling at them upon their arrival and after they exited their car that he’s already inside,” she said.
“Did those officers then go immediately to where you told them and run inside the building?” Goss asked.
“No. I believe, if I remember correctly, they got back into the car and went around the school towards the front of Robb,” she said.
Defense lawyers rested their case on Tuesday after testimony from Cantu and Rodriguez. Closing statements are set for Wednesday.
Prosecutors allege Gonzales, who is charged with 29 counts of child endangerment, did not follow his training and endangered the 19 students who died and an additional 10 surviving students.
Flores, the teaching aide, testified that she repeatedly urged Gonzales to intervene in the shooting, but said he did “nothing” in those crucial moments.
Gonzales has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers argue he is being unfairly blamed for a broader law enforcement failure that day. He could face the rest of his life in prison if convicted of all counts.
Lindsey Halligan, holds ceremonial proclamations to be signed by US President Donald Trump, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, March 6, 2025. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge wants to know why Lindsey Halligan is still using the title of U.S. attorney despite a judge ruling in November that she is legally not in the position.
Halligan, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to be the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, was found by a judge to not be legally allowed to serve in the role because the law doesn’t allow the position to be filled by two interim nominees in a row.
The ruling came two months after Halligan secured indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, only to have them thrown out due to her unlawful appointment.
The issue stems from a recent case in which Halligan, on the indictment, represents that she is the U.S. attorney and “did so despite a binding Court Order entered by Senior United States District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie on November 24, 2025, in which Judge Currie found that the ‘appointment Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney violated 28 U.S.C. § 546 and the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution,'” U.S. District Judge David Novak wrote in a filing Tuesday.
Judge Novak said that while the government is appealing the ruling, it is not subject to being ignored. He ordered the government to explain why Halligan has identified herself as the U.S. attorney within seven days.
“Ms. Halligan shall further explain why her identification does not constitute a false or misleading statement,” the judge wrote.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Halligan, one of Trump’s former personal attorneys, was named U.S. attorney by Trump in September after Trump ousted her predecessor, Erik Siebert, who sources say had expressed doubts internally about bringing cases against James and Comey.
Because Siebert himself had been named interim U.S. attorney by Trump last January, Judge Currie ruled that Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause that limits how long prosecutors can serve without Senate confirmation.
(NEW YORK) — Murat Mayor has no need for an associate’s degree. The 58-year-old business analyst already has a Ph.D. But when he and his son, a high school senior, attempted last fall to apply for federal student financial aid, they learned that an account associated with both of their identities already existed.
Those accounts showed applications to multiple community colleges — and much more.
“We noticed that there [was] a lot of activity” on accounts created in their names, Mayor said in an interview with ABC News. “There are a lot of applications, loan applications, grant applications … then we panicked.”
Mayor knew immediately that something was amiss. He assumed his identity had been stolen. But he had no concept of the breadth of the scheme that had ensnared his and his son’s identity, and he had certainly never heard of the army of digital fraudsters perpetrating the crime.
‘A huge issue’ They are known as “ghost students,” and for thousands of colleges across the country, these sophisticated thieves have a become a scourge. The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money — robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims like Mayor and his son in their wake.
“It’s a huge issue,” said Jason Williams, the assistant inspector general for investigations at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General. “As they’re stealing identities … these loans are not being repaid. They’re being assigned to people [who] don’t even know they have a debt with U.S. Department of Education … [until] the Internal Revenue Service says you owe the Department of Education money.”
Fraudsters have attempted to steal student financial aid for decades, Williams said. But “when the pandemic [hit], everybody went to online learning. Well, by doing that, it really did open the door” for more widespread fraud, said Williams.
Scammers have realized that the move to remote learning at community colleges provides an opportunity to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to expand their reach and circumvent identity verification controls. Almost overnight, experts said, the fraud grew exponentially.
Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by “ghost student” schemes, Williams said. “And that’s only in the universe of what we know, and what we have adjudicated,” he added. “There’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know that’s out there.”
Williams said his office has more than 200 investigations open nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains.
Open season on open enrollment The federal government is on the hook for tuition aid lost to scammers. But it is the community colleges, which accept almost all applicants through open enrollment, that often carry the burden of sniffing out fake applications. And doing so requires the resources, technology and expertise that many institutions do not possess.
Experts say the scope of the fraud is enormous. In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state’s administrative body for the community college system.
Similar figures exist across the country. ABC News and its nationwide network of owned and operated stations investigated the rise of “ghost students” and found that almost no community college has been spared.
Gina Macklin, a senior administrator at Delaware County Community College, told WPVI-TV in Philadelphia that the school found more than 500 fake students enrolled in its classes in 2023, which she described as “a terrible year” for the school, not least of which because those fraudsters “had taken seats from legitimate students.”
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those “students” were real people trying to get an education.
“The rest were fraudulent accounts,” she said. “Ghost students.”
Software solutions The Trump administration last year implemented enhanced fraud controls and identity verification requirements for schools, which experts say helped schools combat fake applicants. But to help root out the fraud, many community colleges have turned to a growing marketplace of identity verification software vendors.
Maurice Simpkins, a retired NFL linebacker, operates one such business. His software is called Student Application Fraudulent Examination, or S.A.F.E.
The platform acts as a firewall for the schools, Simpkins said. “From a football term,” he likes to say, “it’s an offensive line.” He says it catches around 95% of fake applications instantaneously and refers more to the school for additional scrutiny. After just two years on the market, S.A.F.E. is in use in more than 150 schools nationwide, he said.
Administrators at more than a dozen community colleges characterized the rise of “ghost students” as a true crisis. The fraudsters, those administrators say, are taking advantage of a vulnerability created by the degree to which these schools are accessible to students.
Officials say the scammers’ schemes range from the savvy to the sloppy — and all are brazen. One school administrator at a midwestern community college who asked not to be identified shared a “business proposal” he said he received last year from an alleged scammer.
In an email, the alleged scammer, who identified themselves as “Ken from Tanzania,” offered to pay the administrator a share of the proceeds for his help in perpetrating the fraud. “I would really like us to partner and work for 3semesters [sic] and we get something good for us and our families.”
Scammers who operate from overseas present a special challenge, according to investigators. But many of the “ghost students” operate within U.S. borders.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.
Murat Mayor, the 58-year-old business analyst, believes he and his son had their identities stolen as part of a massive hack of their health care provider in 2024. After months of back-and-forth with law enforcement and administrators at community colleges in Maryland and Utah, he finally cleared himself and his son from enrollment records earlier this month.
“He’s a straight-A student, has been very successful — an honor student, so he’s doing well,” Mayor told ABC News regarding his son.
Mayor’s son has applied to study business finance in the fall. And this time, it will really be him.
DHS Federal Coordinator Jeff Brannigan speaks with ABC News at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. (ABC News)
(SANTA CLARA, Calif.) — There will be a “substantial law enforcement presence” in the Bay Area for the week leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, the man who is leading it all told ABC News.
“We have multiple command centers that we are operating as the federal government in concert with our local partners,” Jeff Brannigan, the Department of Homeland Security federal coordinator, told ABC News in an interview. “It’s a broad footprint with a lot of personnel. Some are uniformed and, very clearly, government officials of some way.”
Others are working behind the scenes, he said.
The Super Bowl is a SEAR 1 event, meaning there is extensive federal security coordination.
“The federal government has brought resources to bear to augment the security planning of the cities of Santa Clara, San Francisco and San Jose, and we have brought resources that those cities don’t necessarily have, and that really is a full-domain security posture to include air support, maritime support and support on the ground,” he said.
The federal government will have support from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S Coast Guard; aerial assets from Customs and Border Protection; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA); and even a helicopter that scans for nuclear technology.
Brannigan said he couldn’t get into specifics, but that there are “hundreds of federal special agents from across the government,” working with local police departments to provide security for the event.
Brian Clark, the associate chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Pacific and Southwest region, said his agency is also providing support to state and local law enforcement in the area.
“For Super Bowl events, you have a lot of human trafficking that comes in,” he said. “You’ll also see a lot of drug trafficking that comes in the area for parties and things … So we would like to say for people to be aware, to have that conversation. Take this time, when you’re gathering with your friends and family, have that conversation about the dangers of fentanyl, because one pill, one time can kill.”
There are also law enforcement from outside the immediate area that are being brought in for “mutual aid,” Brannigan said.
Some of the concerns are lone wolf attackers, threats from drones and cyberattacks, he said.
“Oftentimes, people you know will see something and they want to dismiss it as that’s, ‘That’s my imagination,’ or ‘That’s not an issue,'” he said. “It is always better for members of the public to call the police and tell them about something they find suspicious, let the police investigate it, determine it isn’t an issue. But if you see something, say something.”
