At age 11, Miah Cerrillo saw all her classmates murdered and survived by smearing herself in her best friend’s blood. The trauma will never leave her
Until last Tuesday, the daily laughter of children erupted at Robb Elementary School, now turned into a major crime scene. The one left behind by Salvador Ramos, 18, when he murdered 19 children and two teachers within his walls, not caring about the purity of those innocent lives. All of his fatalities occurred in the same fourth-grade class, where only a 10-year-old girl, Miah Cerrillo, is believed to have survived.
They found her like the others, bathed in blood and shrapnel, sprinkled with bone fragments, inert, her eyes wide open. When she saw her, her father panicked. They put her in a yellow bus and took her to the hospital, where, after cleaning the blood of so many dead children, they discovered that she had no bullets in her body.
She was rescued by her best friend, Amerie Joe Garza, in a scene that will haunt Miah for the rest of her days. “You’re going to die,” the 18-year-old told them. Amerie Joe picked up her cell phone and called 911 for the police. “Instead of taking it off and breaking it, he shot it,” his grandmother sobbed in an interview with The Daily Beast. “Her best friend was sitting next to her and she splattered all over her with blood.” In the 45 minutes that the killer was barricaded in that classroom, Miah saw him execute all his classmates and his teacher, but he managed to remain motionless among the corpses, hidden in a locker.
Police spent more than two hours in the hospital questioning the witness to one such massacre, the second largest in U.S. elementary school history and the largest in the last decade, but they were unable to extract anything from her. It was at dusk when she burst into tears and began to scream, afraid the man with the gun would find her, a relative told this newspaper. She refuses to sleep, fearing that the killer will find her in the darkness of her sleep, and wakes at the slightest nod. She is disturbed by visitors, she is surrounded by too many ghosts and people seem overcrowded to her.
With only mosquitoes swarming under a blazing sun where girls used to want to be princesses, Miah has suddenly lost her innocence. Uvalde, with its dusty streets and crossing border coyotes, is no longer a small town no one has heard of, but a burial ground of lost souls unable to shake the incredulity of so much carnage. They have seen the face of evil and will no longer be able to forget it.
Source: La Verdad
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