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.
Jacob Lake, Arizona, Burned trees from the Dragon Bravo Fire. The wildfire burned 145,000 acres on the north rim of the Grand Canyon and in Kaibab National Forest. (Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Several regions in the West could be facing worsening drought conditions, increased wildfire risk, and reduced water supplies due to record-breaking temperatures and minimal winter snowpack.
Much of the West has been coping with prolonged drought conditions that are now being worsened by historically low seasonal snowpack and persistent record-breaking temperatures. With mountain snowpack sharply reduced, the region’s water supplies are facing mounting challenges and elevated wildfire risk is occurring earlier than usual.
More than half of the West continues to experience drought conditions of varying intensity, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The ongoing drought was compounded by the region’s warmest winter on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The drought and record-warm winter were followed by unprecedented, record-breaking heat in March, further intensifying conditions across the region.
Rounds of rain and mountain snow are expected to impact parts of the West in the coming weeks.
However, a full recovery is unlikely in the near term, meaning many detrimental impacts could persist, or even intensify, through the rest of the year. However, the long-term outlook remains uncertain, with the strength of the upcoming monsoon season and the potential development of El Niño and other influential factors.
Record low snowpack Every major river basin and state in the West is experiencing a snow drought, a period of abnormally little snowpack for the time of year, according to NOAA.
The snow drought has significantly worsened in recent weeks following the unprecedented record-breaking March heat in the region. Snowpack is a significant indicator of drought conditions but not the only one.
Many major river basins, including the Colorado River Basin, are experiencing record-low season-to-date snowpack levels. A key metric in assessing these conditions is snow water equivalent, the amount of water contained within the snowpack. It serves as a critical indicator of the West’s water supply, helping determine how much runoff will flow into rivers and reservoirs during the spring melt.
When there is a snow drought in the West, it means “there will be a lack of available water due to the low snowpack to meet the water supply demands of the critical economic sectors we have,” Jason Gerlich, regional drought early warning system coordinator for the NOAA-National Integrated Drought Information System, told ABC News.
While many areas received average or above-average precipitation in the fall and early winter, warmer temperatures led much of it to fall as rain rather than snow, resulting in unusually low snowpack, which typically acts as a natural reservoir.
“If winter precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, our relationship with water in the West becomes even shakier,” said Casey Olson, a climate scientist with the Utah Climate Center. “A gallon of winter rain that immediately runs off downstream is not nearly as helpful come July as a gallon of snowpack that melts in April or May. They are not equivalent gallons of precipitation in terms of our ability to use them when we need them the most.”
Snowpack across the western United States typically peaks in late March or early April, marking a critical point in the region’s water supply outlook. While additional mountain snowfall remains possible through April, and in some higher elevations, into May, recovery to normal snowpack is not climatologically possible at this point, Gerlich noted.
Drought on its own already stresses water supplies, agriculture, and ecosystems. But when winter fails to deliver significant mountain snow, those impacts can intensify. In some states, up to about 75 percent of water supplies can come from melting snow, according to the USGS.
Mounting water supply concerns The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven states: California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Major reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin remain well below average, the agency’s latest data shows, heightening concerns about water availability across the region.
Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the United States, is one of them. Water levels have dropped roughly 7 feet so far this year and are forecast to continue a gradual decline through the months ahead. Despite the recent drop, the reservoir remains more than 8 feet above its record low set in April 2023.
However, current projections suggest that level could be approached, or even challenged again, by late summer if dry conditions persist.
Denver Water, the city’s public water utility, announced water restrictions for the first time since 2013 on Wednesday, seeking a 20% reduction in water use.
“The snowpack within Denver Water’s collection system has deteriorated significantly and continues to decline,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. “Snowpack levels in both basins are now the lowest observed in the past 40 years, with accelerated melting underway.”
Experts warn that restrictions are likely to expand in multiple states as the year progresses, barring significant changes.
Wildfire concerns increase; Long-term risk remains uncertain A large portion of the West will likely face an elevated wildfire risk this spring and summer driven by low snowpack, dry soils, and above-average temperatures, leaving vegetation drier and more flammable than usual.
However, experts say the long-term wildfire outlook for the region is less certain than it might seem and the risk could vary in intensity in the coming months, depending on conditions.
“Low snowpack and fire don’t have a one-to-one relationship, but low snowpack can lead to an early start to the fire season,” Gerlich said.
The record-breaking March heat further dried the landscape, priming it for wildfires earlier than usual. Parts of Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico have already seen impactful wildfires this year. Experts say the long-term wildfire outlook hinges on how several key conditions develop over the next few months.
“One positive right now is that the last few years have resulted in limited growth of the fine fuels that are quick to burn, so that does help temper fire risk for areas in the West, however, the lack of snowpack this year presents conditions through the high timber forests where fire risk this summer could be very high,” Olson added.
The latest outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center shows an overall near-average risk of significant wildland fires across the West through May with a more widespread above-average risk unfolding across the Four Corners region, including parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona in June.
“The Southwest looks to continue with the warm and dry seasonal pattern. One source of optimism is for the possibility of an active monsoon pattern this summer,” said Olson. “An active monsoon system in general should provide some relief to portions of the Southwest states, the question remains exactly where that relief would focus, and we won’t have a good handle on that until later this spring.”
A sign marks the location of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building on April 30, 2025, in Washington, DC. J. David Ake/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Three million pages from the Justice Department’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are being released to the public today, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing Friday.
Blanche said the release will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.
Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.
Blanche pushed back on the notion that the DOJ might have protected President Donald Trump from his name appearing in the files.
“We comply with the act, and there is no ‘protect President Trump.’ We didn’t protect or not protect anybody. I mean, I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that,” Blanche told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
Blanche said there was “no oversight” by the White House about what the material showed.
He added that if there was evidence in the files that others had abused victims, the DOJ would pursue charges against them.
A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to redact and review material, Blanche said.
“If any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the response of production in any unredacted form, they’re welcome to make arrangements with the department to do so, and we’re happy to do that,” said Blanche.
Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on Nov. 19. The act gave the Justice Department 30 days to make publicly available all unclassified records pertaining to investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
The bill contains several exceptions that allow for withholding or redacting records, notably to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims.
The DOJ to date had posted to its online Epstein library roughly 12,000 documents totaling about 125,000 pages — just a small fraction of the millions of records the department has been reviewing.
Those materials included a record of a complaint to the FBI filed in 1996, years before the disgraced financier was first investigated for child sex abuse. The documents also included new details about the government’s investigation into potential accomplices as well as thousands of photographs of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Islands properties that were searched by the FBI after Epstein’s arrest in 2019.
The initial release of the files also contained numerous old photos of Epstein traveling with former President Bill Clinton, including pictures of Clinton lounging in a jacuzzi and one of him swimming with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and other offenses.
The images, which were released without any context or background information, contained little information related to Trump, leading a spokesperson for Clinton to accuse the DOJ of selectively disclosing the pictures to imply wrongdoing on the part of Clinton where he said there is none.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Angel Urena said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”
In an interview with ABC News on the day of the initial release, Blanche said that every document that mentions Trump will eventually be released, “assuming it’s consistent with the law.”
“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” Blanche said.
Both Trump and Clinton have denied all wrongdoing and have denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
Federal prosecutors have indicated in recent court filings that hundreds of government lawyers have spent weeks reviewing “several millions of pages” of materials — including documents, audio and video files — in preparation for disclosure to the public.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act came after the Trump administration faced months of blowback from its announcement last July that they would be releasing no additional Epstein files, after several top officials — including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino — had, prior to joining the administration, accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.
The files released thus far have yet to show evidence of wrongdoing on the part of famous, powerful men, against the expectations of many of those who pushed for the files’ release.
Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large properties in New York City, New Mexico and Palm Beach, Florida, where he came under investigation for allegedly luring minor girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes charges after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.
In 2019, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Epstein on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.
U.S. President Donald Trump takes the stage to speak during a rally at the Horizon Events Center on January 27, 2026 in Clive, Iowa. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — In the hours after FBI agents seized 2020 election ballots from an elections facility in Georgia on Wednesday, President Donald Trump posted a series of thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election — and the 2016 election too.
Fulton County officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI said they were conducting court-authorized activity at the facility, but said they would provide no further information.
Late Wednesday night, the president reposted to his social media platform a claim that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden.
“China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” the post reads. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.”
That was just one of a flurry of posts and reposts by Trump making discredited claims about the 2020 election, directly tying the allegations to the FBI’s seizure of ballots on Wednesday.
“This is only the beginning,” Trump said, reposting other posts about the FBI’s action in Georgia. “Prosecutions are coming.”
The development comes after Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election, and numerous lawsuits challenging the election results in the state were rejected by the courts.
Among the statements posted and reposted by Trump following the FBI’s actions in Georgia is one on the 2016 election that falsely claims that “Barack Hussein Obama” falsified intelligence and “conspired with foreign powers, not one, not two, not three, but four times to overthrow the United States government in 2016.”
In addition to being baseless, the claim ignores the fact that Obama was president in 2016, so if he tried to overthrow the government, he would have been overthrowing himself.
The conspiracy theory about Italian military satellites is not new. In 2021, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows directed both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense to look into the matter.
As documented in my 2021 book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” the conspiracy theory was brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases including “The Heiress” and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates. She passed her material off to a national security council official at a supermarket parking lot in Arlington.
The Italian spy satellite theory was just one of many unsubstantiated allegations made about the 2020 election by Trump and his supporters. At a Trump campaign press conference in November 2020, lawyer Sydney Powell infamously claimed that voting machines had been rigged using software that was “created at the direction of Hugo Chavez.” This was an especially extravagant claim because Chavez, the former leader of Venezuela, had died three years earlier.
In 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to state charges of conspiracy to commit “intentional interference with performance of election duties” in Georgia and agreed to serve six years of probation and to pay a $6,000 fine.
And now it appears that Sidney Powell is back. In a post on X Thursday morning, DOJ official Ed Martin posted a picture of himself with Powell, writing, “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”
