Jailah Silguero, 10, was the youngest of four siblings, the “baby” of the family, her father said. She loved going to school and seeing her friends. She was one of the children killed at Robb Elementary School in Texas.
On Monday night, the day before the attack, Jailah told her father, Jacob Silguero, 35, that she wanted to stay home on Tuesday. It was uncharacteristic of her, and by the next morning, Silguero said, Jailah seemed to have forgotten about it. She got dressed and went to school like every day. “I can’t believe this happened to my daughter, my baby,” he said. “I was always afraid of losing one of my children.”
Silguero and his family were preparing to go to a funeral home on Wednesday, after spending hours the day before at the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center, waiting for information about Jailah. Officials asked for DNA samples from the family. “After the DNA test I suspected it was something very bad,” said Silguero. “An hour later, they called to confirm that she had died.”
Silguero said that Jailah’s brothers are unhappy. “They just want their sister back.” Jailah Silguero is one of 21 people – 19 children and two adults – killed in Tuesday’s massacre.
Two cousins ​​in the same class
Jackie Cazares and Annabelle Rodriguez were cousins ​​and classmates at Robb Elementary School in the city of Uvalde. Jackie, who made her first communion two weeks ago, was the more communicative of the two, commented Polly Flores, Jackie’s aunt and Annabelle’s great-aunt. “She was outgoing. She liked being the center of attention,” Flores said. “She was my little diva.”
Annabelle, one of the top students in the class, was quieter. But she and her cousin were close friends, so much so that Annabelle’s twin, who was homeschooled in the homeschooling system, “was jealous,” Flores said. “We are a very close family. This here is devastating.”
A little girl who loved her friends
Amerie Jo Garza, 10, was a communicative child who liked to play with plasticine. She was “playful, funny, always smiling,” her father Alfred Garza III said in a quick phone interview.
She didn’t talk much about school, but she liked hanging out with her friends at lunch, on the playground, and at recess. “She was very sociable, she talked to everyone,” said her father. Amerie Jo’s extended family was gathered in the living room when Texan police broke the ghastly news Tuesday night. In the last two years the family had already lost several loved ones, killed by Covid.
“We were finally in a better phase, nobody was dying,” Garza said. “And then this.”
Garza works at a used car dealership in Uvalde. He said he was on lunch break when Amerie Jo’s mother told him she couldn’t pick up her daughter because the school was on lockdown. “I went there right away and found chaos,” she said. Garza said he saw cars blocking the streets, with parents trying to enter the school to locate their children. There were cars everywhere.
At first, he didn’t think anyone had been hurt. Then he heard that children had died. He spent hours waiting to hear from his daughter. After being contacted by the police, he said, he was in shock. Returning home, he started looking at pictures of his daughter.
“It was only then that emotion took over me,” Garza said. “I started crying.”
‘She brought the neighborhood together’
Eva Mireles, who was in her early 40s, loved teaching at Robb School, most recently fourth graders. Her neighbors described her as a good-natured and normally smiling person.
“She brought the neighborhood together,” said Javier Garcia, 18, a neighbor of Mireles. “Eva loved those children.”
A cousin of hers, Joe Costilla, 40, said that outside of work, she liked to run marathons and play sports. “We would always spend time together, go to barbecues – she was a wonderful person,” she said, holding back tears. They had planned to meet over the Memorial Day holiday.
Costilla’s mother Esperanza came to his house to comfort her grandchildren, ages 14 and 10, who knew Mireles well. “They’re in a lot of pain. Eva was the kind of teacher everyone loved.”
Audrey Garcia, 48, has a daughter with Down syndrome named Gabby and said Mireles was a teacher who turned her life around. Gabby Garcia is 23 years old and has a high school diploma. Mireles was her third grade teacher. Garcia said it was just two years before schools in the Uvalde region began to integrate students with intellectual disabilities into regular classrooms.
“It was a novelty for the professors in that area”, she said, noting that Mireles was involved in the work with body and soul. “She used every method she knew to help Gabby reach her full potential. She never saw her as inferior to anyone else in the class.”
‘A tough guy’
José Flores, 10, had a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “tough men walk in pink.” His grandfather George Rodriguez called him “my little Josesito” and carried a picture of the boy in his wallet.
Rodriguez, who also lost a niece in the massacre, received psychological care at the civic center in Uvalde, but said it did not ease his pain. “They were beautiful, innocent children,” he said.
In the list of the best students
On the day he was killed, Xavier López, 10, made the list of the best students in his class. He was looking forward to getting back home and sharing the news with the three brothers, but his grandparents said he decided to stay at school to watch a movie and eat popcorn with his classmates instead.
They said that Xavier loved playing baseball and football and that he had a girlfriend at school he used to talk to on the phone. In front of the family home on Wednesday, Xavier’s grandfather, Leonard Sandoval, 54, tried to understand the incomprehensible. “Why?” he questioned. “Why him? Why the kids?”
