The first testimonies of children who survived the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, were heard this Saturday (28). Last Tuesday (24), a young gunman killed 19 children and two adults.
Texas officials admitted that police made a “wrong decision” by not rushing into the school after being alerted. It took the police about an hour to put an end to the massacre, despite several calls from children asking for help.
According to the police, the 19 agents who were at the scene were waiting for the intervention of a specialized unit of the border police. Inside, a group of students were locked in a classroom with the gunman, Salvador Ramos, 18, equipped with a semi-automatic rifle.
Upon entering the room, Ramos closed the door and addressed the children. “You are all going to die,” the gunman said before opening fire, according to the report by Samuel Salinas, 10, one of the survivors, in an interview with ABC this Friday (27).
“I think he was aiming at me,” the boy added, adding that a chair between him and the shooter blocked the bullet. Lying on the living room floor, Samuel Salinas pretended to be dead to avoid being shot at.
Beside him, Miah Cerrillo, 11, similarly tried to escape the sniper’s attention. In an unrecorded statement to CNN, the girl said she covered herself with the blood of a colleague, whose body was next to her. She also said that at that moment she had just seen the teenager kill his teacher.
Another student, Daniel, told The Washington Post that while they were waiting for police help, no one screamed. His teacher, wounded in the attack, whispered to the students to be “calm” and “quiet”—he also survived.
“I was scared and stressed because the bullets almost hit me,” said Daniel, who can no longer sleep alone and has nightmares. He also said that a girl who was shot asked a teacher to call the police because she was “bleeding profusely”.
Samuel Salinas also said that he had nightmares in which he saw the shooter. The thought of going back to school or even seeing classmates again is still terrifying. “I really don’t feel like it,” he said, who wants to “stay home” and “rest.”
Pressed by reporters to explain the security forces’ response time, Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said on Friday that police believed “there might not be any more survivors” at the school.
McCraw, however, admitted that police received numerous calls from people in the raided classrooms, including a call from a child at 12:16 pm, more than half an hour before the police intervention at 12:50 pm, warning that there were “eight or nine students alive.” “.
The US president and his wife, Jill Biden, will go to Uvalde this Sunday (28). “We can make America safer,” Joe Biden said in a speech on Saturday, lamenting that “many innocent people have died.”
The case sparked outrage in the US and more calls for measures to prevent further massacres.
On Tuesday night, Biden used the episode to once again criticize the pro-gun lobby in the country and defend the control of access to weapons. “I’m tired of this. Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?” he questioned.
