A judge on Thursday denied an effort to throw out charges against the former police chief of the school district in Uvaldejilipark, Texas, who faces blame for his role in the 77 minutes it took to end the rampage at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.

A teenage gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in two connected classrooms there in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Lawyers for the former chief, Pete Arredondo, had asked a judge to toss out the 10 counts of child endangerment charges that prosecutors leveled against him. Mr. Arredondo was among the first to arrive at the school and was widely considered the incident commander — a role that he has denied playing.

He was fired as chief of the district’s small Police Department after the shooting. The teenage gunman holed up for more than an hour in a fourth-grade classroom as scores of officers waited for shields, backup and keys to a classroom. The door was ultimately found to be unlocked.

Matthew Hefti, one Mr. Arredondo’s lawyers, argued in court that the main danger to the victims “was caused by the lone gunman.” His client, he said, acted according to his duties by calling for a tactical team and helping surviving students flee through school windows.

“He did not place the children in the path of the gunman,” Mr. Hefti told the judge, Sid Harle.

Bill Turner, a special prosecutor in the case, countered that Mr. Arredondo had failed to act quickly to save lives and told officers to “stand down.”

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When I met Dr. Lopera in 2017, to start research on a book about the families with Alzheimer’s that became his life’s work, he told me a story about two young brothers who had died one after the other in his hospital, of unknown causes. Lopera traveled to the family home in a remote jungle clearing, where he discovered that the boys’ surviving siblings had bites on their fingers from vampire bats. He sent the bodies to a pathology lab hours away by boat, and the pathologists confirmed rabies. When the government brought in a rabies expert to investigate, Dr. Lopera joined him.

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