The emotional sibling of a Uvalde school massacre victim was barred from a Texas courtroom when she disrupted the child endangerment trial of a former police officer Tuesday, telling the court that her sister used her body to protect her students in the “fatal funnel” before law enforcement.
“You know who went into the fatal funnel? My sister,” Velma Duran cried out inside a Corpus Christi, Texas, courtroom, using a tactical term for a narrow area, such as a hallway, that leaves law enforcement vulnerable to attack, according to KENS5.
Duran’s sister, Irma Garcia, a teacher at Robb Elementary School, was among the 21 people — including 19 kids — killed by teen gunman Salvador Ramos on May 24, 2022.
“Did she need a key? Why do you need a key?” Duran questioned as she was dragged out of the courtroom, according to video shared by the outlet.
The furious sibling’s courtroom outburst came at the end of a cross-examination of Sgt. Joe Vasquez, who was one of the five officers who took down Ramos nearly 80 minutes after gunfire broke out.
“You know now that he was in a fatal funnel with those first five officers and two of those officers got shot?” defense attorney Nico LaHood asked Vasquez, referring to former Uvalde schools officer Adrian Gonzales.
“Yes, sir,” Vasquez answered.
Gonzales is facing 29 counts of child abandonment for the 19 students killed and 10 additional children who survived the shooting.
The former school cop allegedly waited until “after the damage had been done” to enter the building and hunt the gunman, prosecutors said at the beginning of the trial.
Duran has been invested in the trial, furious that no criminal charges have been filed for the deaths of her 48-year-old sister and her co-teacher Eva Mireles, 44.
“Now I know, no ones gonna take accountability for my sister’s death. It’s like she never existed,” Duran told Texas Public Radio after being removed from court.
Judge Sid Harle barred Duran from reentering the courtroom for the remainder of the trial.
“There’s two wonderful women dead, who tried their best to protect their children. They didn’t need a shield, they didnt need an AR-15 or a pistol, they didn’t need nothing,” Duran said. “They used themselves to protect their children.”
Duran revealed she was shocked by how often her sister’s fourth-grade classroom was referenced in the trial, including autopsy photos of the students.
“Seeing the faces on the screen today, it was just like I couldn’t breathe, and then having to be really quiet, because if you cry, you make an outburst, the chance is that you won’t be able to return. So it was really, really difficult,” she told the outlet.
“My sister not being on the indictment … I just, I don’t know. [Uvalde District Attorney Christina] Mitchell, the last time I spoke to her, she said it was going to take time… And, you know, to let the process work,” Duran recalled.
Duran has been an outspoken critic of Gonzales, ripping into the former officer to reporters after the first day of the trial on Jan. 6.
“He could have stopped him, but he didn’t want to be the target,” Duran said, claiming that her sister died protecting her students.
Gonzales is one of two officers whom prosecutors took the rare step of bringing criminal charges against for allegedly failing to do more to save lives in one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.
Defense attorneys maintain Gonzales acted based on his training and the information he had at the time.
“The government wants it to seem like he just sat there,” LaHood told the jury in his opening day statements. “He did what he could, with what he knew at the time.
“This isn’t a man waiting around. This isn’t a man failing to act,” Gonzales’s other lawyer, Jason Goss said.
