On the eve of President Joe Biden’s visit, they emerged this Saturday the first testimonies of surviving children of the Uvalde massacre, who describe the horror in this Texas schoolin the southern United States, where an armed teenager killed 19 students and two teachers.
The day before, the Texas authorities had made their mea culpa, admitting that the police had made a “wrong decision” by not quickly entering the school after being alerted.
On Tuesday, the police took about an hour to put an end to the massacre, despite several calls from children asking for an intervention. 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 was locked in a classroom with the shooter, Salvador Ramos, just 18 years old and equipped with a semi-automatic rifle. Upon entering the classroom, Ramos closed the door and addressed the children: “They are all going to die,” before opening fire, a survivor, 10-year-old Samuel Salinas, told ABC channel on Friday.
“I think he was aiming at me,” the boy confessed, but a chair between him and the shooter blocked the bullet. Lying on the floor of the classroom covered in blood, Samuel Salinas, in order not to be the target of the shots, played dead.
“Keep calm”
At his side, Miah Cerrillo, 11, tried to escape the attention of Salvador Ramos in the same way. The girl covered herself with the blood of a partner, whose body was next to her, she explained to CNN, in an unfilmed testimony. She had just seen the teenager kill her teacher, after saying “good night”.
Another student, Daniel, told the newspaper Washington Post that while the victims waited for the police to come to their rescue, no one cried out.
“I was scared and stressed, because the bullets almost hit me,” he said. Her teacher, who was injured in the attack but survived, whispered to the students to “stay calm” and “stay still.”
A girl, also shot, had politely asked her teacher to call the police, saying she was “bleeding a lot,” said Daniel, who can no longer sleep alone and has nightmares. The children who survived “are traumatized and will have to live with it all their lives,” said his mother, Briana Ruiz.
Samuel Salinas also stated 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 don’t really feel like it,” he confessed, adding that he wanted to “stay home” and “rest.”
In Uvalde, several dozen people gathered on Saturday morning in the central square, which became a place of homage to the victims. On the 21 crosses that are now there, one for each victim, there are signs that say “I love you” or “I miss you”, while many people left stuffed animals or flowers in tribute.
“We have to help these children get out of this trauma, out of this pain”said Humberto Renovato, 33, who came to offer condolences and thinks of the survivors.
criticism of the police
The testimonies only accentuated the controversy surrounding the police reaction.
Pressed by reporters to explain his much-criticized response time, Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Friday that law enforcement believed “there may not be any more survivors.”
However, heThe police received numerous calls from various people from the two affected classrooms, including one from a child at 12:16, more than half an hour before the police intervention at 12:50, warning that “between eight and nine students were alive “McCraw admitted.
Biden on Sunday
On Sunday, the president of the United States and his wife Jill Biden will go to Uvalde to “share the mourning” of the inhabitants of this small town, dismayed by one of the worst massacres with a firearm in recent years in the country.
“You can’t make dramas illegal, I know. But you can make America safer,” Joe Biden said in a speech on Saturday, lamenting that “so many innocent people have died.”
“We will not allow those who are motivated by hate to separate us or scare us,” said its vice president, Kamala Harris, who in mid-May he was at the funeral of one of the ten black victims killed in a racist shooting in Buffalo, New York.
The cry for more regulation
The Uvalde shooting, described in the US press as the “new Sandy Hook,” referring to the gruesome massacre at a Connecticut elementary school in 2012aroused the traumas of the United States by similar incidents with firearms.
The faces of the very young victims, between 9 and 11 years old, broadcast repeatedly on television, and the testimonies of their devastated loved ones shocked the country, reviving a wave of calls for better regulation of firearms, something that still it was not possible to agree in Congress due to deep divisions.
Biden, who regularly denounced the “epidemic” of gun violence, has so far failed to pass any major legislation to control the sale and use of weapons by civilians.