Uvalde, Texas () — Editor’s Note: This report contains explicit images and descriptions of the Uvalde school massacre. All of the children photographed survived, and their parents asked to show the images so people could see what their sons and daughters had to endure and understand what this kind of violence does.
The mothers called and texted. They wanted to see the videos showing their children in one of the worst moments of their young lives: the body camera recordings as they carried out the bloodied and traumatized boys and girls after spending 77 minutes with a murderous attacker in the school classrooms. Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.
It had been almost a year since his children survived the massacre of 19 of their fourth grade classmates and two teachers. But they still had many questions, and no authority seemed willing to answer.
“We have to see it. Really,” Kassandra Chavez told . I knew the footage existed and that the team investigating the poor law enforcement response to the school shooting probably had it as part of the investigative material we obtained and used in several exclusive reports on what happened at the school on past May 24.
‘s role is not to provide material directly to families, let alone these explicit and gruesome scenes of a cheery elementary school hallway stained red with children’s blood. The release of surveillance and body camera video, along with a precise timeline of who did what and when, is often the responsibility of the law enforcement agencies involved, even if they show officers were wrong. This has been the case recently in Memphis, Nashville and St. Louis.
But in Uvalde, District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee blocked all material until she finishes her investigation. Mayor Don McLaughlin went against her request that officials not share information and released videos of Uvalde Police Department officers at the scene, but they only showed what happened before the attack.
And, according to the mothers, that left too many questions about the trauma their children were still suffering from and whether the rescue operation should have unfolded differently.
“They’ve only called us once or twice at the prosecutor’s office in the beginning and now they haven’t told us anything,” Chávez said. “That is, we find out later or through social networks that something is happening.”
Learning that families — along with other media organizations — were not allowed access to recordings that would normally be public, made the rare decision to let the families watch.
We had already shared with their parents the heartbreaking and infuriating 911 calls made by two survivors, Khloie Torres and Miah Cerrillo, before reporting how those calls showed law enforcement knew there were children trapped with the shooter who needed to be rescued, about 40 minutes before the agents entered the classroom. Those parents said the calls helped them understand a little better what their children had been through, and they wanted them to get across. But still, they wanted to see the videos.
tears and rage
So, on a recent spring afternoon, the mothers of five of the survivors in Room 112 gathered around a laptop and got ready.
Their children were away, as the parents had been told to take them somewhere else. The trauma counselor who works with families was waiting.
Women were once again warned that what was to be shown was explicit, shocking and difficult to watch. One by one, they reaffirmed that it was what they wanted to do. Miguel Cerrillo, Miah’s father, entered the room and said that he also wanted to see it. “I just want to see the big picture, exactly what he went through, where he was,” he said. “I want to see… how they suffered and why they suffered so long.”
The video begins with the sound of gunshots as the agents finally enter the classrooms. Police later said the gunman came out of a closet at that moment and fired at them, and they fired back at him and he died.
The armed officers are still lined up in the hallway. Some begin to move towards the classrooms. “Children! Children! Children!” one yells as the victims begin to emerge. “Hands up, hands up!” the agent yells at them. Then everyone is asked to wait, to be silent.
Jaydien Canizales screams when she manages to get out of the classroom. She hid under a table, her hands over her ears to try to block the shots. (Credit: City of Uvalde)
The screams do not take long to repeat themselves and they ask that the paramedics be allowed to pass first. A person is being dragged down the hall by the arms. Others are carried in their arms or pulled. Bloodied children are urged to yell, “Move! Move! Move.” An agent carries one in his arms. Another is thrown over their shoulders and rushed away.
Parents watch intently and point to their children. “There’s Jaydien, there’s AJ, Khloie, Miah.”
Tears well up, but they don’t look away.
Mothers focus on their sons and daughters. Miguel Cerrillo seems obsessed with the emergency services. “All those guns,” he says, watching as one officer apparently picks up guns so his teammates have a free hand to help. Anger boiled in Cerrillo as he spoke of the 77 minutes his daughter and the others had to wait to be rescued, alone in a fourth-grade classroom, while heavily armed and trained officers debated what to do, and never tried the doorknob. door to see if it was locked. “Why are they still standing there?” he asked as officers hurried the children out and others watched.
As word of the multiple deaths begins to spread among officers, those outside the school are reminded to keep families away.
Cerrillo remembered how he had been there, among those families, yelling for information. And then he left the room, unable to see any more images. “That’s all I can see,” he said as he got up. In his backyard, he vented to his friends: “All the p **** policemen who were there have to hand in their badges. All the p **** policemen in Uvalde have to hand over their badges.”
bouncing on a bus
While paramedics tended to several critically injured children, other survivors were loaded onto a school bus for transport to the hospital, along with two Texas Department of Public Safety officers, both wearing body cameras.
Kassandra Chavez broke down when she saw her son AJ’s pain. For her part, Kristina Olivares could barely see how the agents struggled to keep her daughter Kendall aware of her. Miah’s mother, Abigale Veloz, was crying.
AJ Martínez, shot in the right thigh, is seen on the school bus that takes him to the hospital. He hid under some backpacks. (Credit: Texas Department of Public Safety)
Jamie Torres, who viewed it separately, told that he wanted to see the video of his daughter. “If she went through that, I should be strong enough to see it,” he said. “I want to see everything that hurt my baby.”
But she couldn’t bear to see the images of her daughter, mourning her best friend who was killed next to her and covered in someone else’s blood she had rolled in so she could pretend she was dead too if the attacker looked at her. It was too much. The video had to be stopped.
Even so, the mothers said they did not regret seeing it.
“We had to see it for ourselves, now we understand it better,” said Chavez, whose son, AJ, was shot in the thigh. “I’m glad he’s here, I’m upset about what he had to go through for 77 minutes, watching all of his friends being taken away like rag dolls… those are all the memories he has.”
Olivares said she hadn’t wanted to believe how sick her daughter had been as the bus headed to the hospital, bouncing and pushing children into the bench seats, but got some answers. “Knowing that my daughter was fainting,” she said, was important because it was something Kendall couldn’t remember.
“Thank you for doing that,” Chávez told . “He gave her answers,” he added, gesturing to Olivares. “He gave me closure, all of us closure.”
The parents asked to show the images of their injured and traumatized children, as just a fraction of the horror of that day. They said they wanted people to better understand the attack, for the officers involved to see their children and, as Torres put it, “make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Khloie Torres covered herself in the blood that covered the floor to play dead when the attacker entered her classroom. She also called 911 multiple times for help. (Credit: Texas Department of Public Safety)
State Senator Roland Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde and who has become a strong supporter of the Uvalde families and their fight for “common sense” gun law reform, supports their decisions and knows how many more images explicit and horrible there are of the Uvalde massacre. He said he remembers the strength of Emmett Till’s mother, who wanted the world to see the face of her teenage son, beaten and shot, in her coffin, a move that in 1955 helped fuel the Civil Rights movement.
“We’ve all seen those black and white photos of Emmett Till and we’ve all seen the horror of what society did, what the Deep South did, what those murderers did to your little boy. The pictures I’ve seen [de lo que] What has happened to these children is that and more,” he said. “There is an image of a girl that I can’t get out of my head: the distortion of what that shot did to her head and face, and how it distorts the body. It’s unbelievable the damage that was done to those little babies.”
He said he considered showing the image privately to senators who block measures like raising the age limit to buy an assault rifle to 21, because a political opponent had told him: “There’s a reason we don’t watch the videos.” Gutiérrez said that he did not go ahead, since it was not his daughter, and neither was it his decision.
Gutierrez said she also clearly remembered the video showing Khloie Torres, then 10, collapsing on the bus taking her out of school while talking about calling 911 and then about her best friend who had died.
For Jamie Torres, Khloie’s mother, the pain is visceral.
“My heart aches, seeing what he went through, seeing what he saw.”
