() — Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grade student who was injured, was on the phone with a 911 operator when a volley of gunfire from the shooter erupted at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
“He’s shooting,” Miah is heard saying at 12:21 pm.
“Keep quiet, make sure everyone stays quiet,” the operator tells her.
It will be an additional 29 minutes before officers engage the shooter and kill him.
By this time, armed officers were stacked outside connecting classrooms 111 and 112, where they waited, talked, checked equipment and searched for tools until finally a team entered the classrooms and killed the shooter.
Throughout the call, Miah and her classmate Khloie Torres, who survived, ask that agents be sent to help save them from the massacre that left 19 children and two teachers dead in Uvalde.
Little did they know that as many as 376 personnel from 23 local, state and federal agencies had responded to the incident, many of whom were only feet away from them, their injured friends and teachers. At least one child and a teacher initially survived the attack but later died.
And now, Miah’s parents, Abigale Veloz and Miguel Cerrillo, want all those agents to listen to the call of their daughter, who was injured by shrapnel in the shoulders and head.
Khloie Torres, photographed by her mom, did everything she could to keep her friends calm and get help.
“If kids call and say they’re hurt or in the classroom, that shows they’re really cowardly,” Cerrillo said of responding officers.
“All the officers who were there should listen to this audio so they can understand what the hell the kids are going through, and these suckers are out there.”
The chaotic and protracted response on May 24 has been denounced as a failure for months. But the full details of what happened and when are still under wraps and Texas’s top police officer did not provide an update as expected at a public meeting last week. Instead, Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, heard the anger from family members and acknowledged some mistakes, before saying his officers “didn’t fail the community” of Uvalde.
Understanding your daughter’s ordeal
Miah’s parents contacted after we broke a story Tuesday about Miah’s classmate Khloie calling 911 and giving details of the dead and injured in Room 112 about 40 minutes before officers finally called. burst into the room to stop the attacker and remove the victims.
Khloie’s father, Ruben Torres, praised his daughter’s actions and contrasted them again with the officers’ inaction after hearing the 911 call. “That day, the things he did were absolutely unbelievable,” he said of his daughter. . Of the adults who responded, he said, “None of them had any courage that day.”
obtained the audio of the 18-minute 911 call from a source and is using it with the approval of Khloie and Miah’s parents. It’s the call that should have ended any doubt or hesitation that the teenage attacker was active, wandering between the two connected classrooms, that the children were trapped, injured and needed to be saved.
Wednesday was the first time Miah’s parents heard the call and they said it helped them understand more of what Miah had told them about that day and what she had been through.
They could hear her trying to help her teacher Eva Mireles, who had been shot and later died, while also giving her room number to Khloie, who was new to Uvalde and the school. And when Khloie broadcasts the operator’s directive for everyone to be quiet, Miah tries to silence her scared and hurt fourth-grade classmates.
And then they hear her enter the line, taking over from Khloie, with the same clear and polite requests.
“Hello, can you send help please?” Miah asks at 12:19 pm, 46 minutes since the attacker was seen entering the room, but still 30 minutes before he was apprehended.
“Are they in the building?” she asks repeatedly about the law enforcement response. Her mother said Miah believed the officers were still trying to find a way to get to them, not realizing that they were piled up on the other side of the door, just a few feet away.
Her family has tried to shield her from learning more about the botched response, but last month she found part of a body camera video online showing distraction, delay and miscommunication.
“I was so mad,” Veloz said of Miah when she found out. “She couldn’t believe they were there.”
In this still from video released by Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, School Police Chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, left, speaks on the phone in the hallway of Robb Elementary School.
after the massacre
Miah was able to tell days later how she smeared blood on herself and played dead hoping the attacker would leave her alone if she came back from the next classroom. She even testified before the US Congress, in a video message sent to a House committee investigating gun violence, in which she said that what she wanted was “to be safe.”
These days, Miah finds it hard to open up to strangers, her mom said. The only people she trusts are her relatives.
Her parents said hearing her on the 911 call gave them “a mental image” of what she had told them.
“Now we understand why he doesn’t want to go anywhere,” Veloz said.
They still find bullet fragments embedded in his back, and the emotional toll is almost as visible.
“She’s not Miah anymore,” her mother said simply, recalling that her daughter loved to play pranks with her siblings and is now afraid of loud noises.
This week is Miah’s birthday. She will be 12 on Friday. And her wish for her birthday, her mother said, is to be calm and leave Uvalde for the day.
