The bullets frustrated the lives of the little boy who loved to dance, the “happiest doll in the world” and the student who, in a heroic act, tried to warn the police
“My darling now flies high with the angels above.” Alfred Garza posted this sentence on the internet. He thanked the rest of Uvalde’s neighbors for helping them find his daughter Amerie Joe after learning of the shooting at her school. For a long time, Tuesday, he heard nothing from her. “I’m not asking much, but please, it’s been seven hours and I haven’t heard from my love,” he begged on Facebook. Shortly after, she wrote, “Thank you all for your prayers and for helping me find my baby.” Amerie Jo, the girl with the big smile, was already safe with the angels. At the age of ten, she was shot dead after trying to call emergency services while unsuccessfully hiding from the devil’s gaze. “Take care of your little brother for me,” his father begged.
The sad story of the Garza family toured the United States from coast to coast this Wednesday. And with it those of the remaining residents of this small Texas town whose souls were riddled with bullets by one of their neighbors, the young Salvador Ramos, just one day before school began its school holidays. “We take our children to school alone,” repeated one anguished mother, whose offspring will now return home in a coffin. “The trauma and pain is immense, unimaginable, and will affect most parents for the rest of their lives,” an expert who worked for years with relatives of the victims of the Parkland tragedy in Florida told television on Wednesday.
On that occasion, a person only a year older than Ramos murdered 17 people in an institution. A Washington Post report said on Wednesday that 330 education centers, including schools and college campuses, have been the scene of armed clashes since the 1999 Columbine massacre, when two students shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher. In these twenty-three years, 185 children, teachers and teaching staff have died, 369 have been injured and several thousand have suffered psychological consequences from these crimes. According to the same journalistic survey, at least 311,000 students have been exposed to armed violence during school hours.
“They were all children,” a police officer mused Wednesday at the scene of the latest massacre. Hundreds of officers, forensics and specialist personnel worked all day collecting evidence of the massacre. The children’s laughter did not echo in the classrooms or in the hallways. If anything, some sobs and the sound of breaking glass bouncing off walls and floors still stained with blood. The blood of a child whose greatest dream was to become a dancer growing up, of Ellie “the happiest doll in the world,” as her father recalled on Facebook. He was happy these days until a deranged man cut off love from beneath his feet. “I went to DJ for her at her party!” he exclaimed.
The sheriff’s deputy was one of the first to peek into hell after Ramos fell. There she learned that her aunt Eva Mireles was one of the two deceased teachers. She had been teaching for 17 years, loved “running and walking”, was married and had a daughter who graduated. They found her hugging her students.
Source: La Verdad
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