New reports offer horrifying details from the Robb Elementary shooting, as experienced by a student in the classroom and the father of a survivor.
Dan Carson, Chron Senior Editor
May 26, 2022
Updated: May 26, 2022 9:12 a.m.
UVALDE,TEXAS, USA - MAY 25: Flowers are placed on a make shift memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 25, 2022. Texas state troopers outside Robb Elementary School 19 students and one teacher were killed during a massacre in a Texas elementary school, the deadliest US school shooting.
Horrifying details have emerged regarding the moments inside a Robb Elementary classroom on Tuesday when it was targeted by suspected mass shooter Salvador Ramos, an 18-year-old gunman who was killed after allegedly going on a
shooting spree that took the lives of
19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
An unidentified fourth-grader who survived Tuesday's massacre told KENS 5 San Antonio that the shooter fired a shot before entering the classroom through an adjoining door, and then told the students they were going to die.
"He shot the next person's door. We have a door in the middle. He opened it. He came in and he crouched a little bit and he said, he said, 'It's time to die,'" the boy told KENS 5.
The child and four of his classmates were likely saved by their decision to hide under a table with an overhanging table cloth, obscuring them from the shooter's sight, according to the report. The boy said the shooter retaliated against one of his classmates after police offers outside the room urged them to yell if they needed help. One of his classmates responded, inspiring the gunman the shoot her.
"When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'Help!' The [shooter] overheard and he came in and shot her," the child told KENS 5.
The Washington Post
published a timeline reconstruction of Tuesday's deadly events, which included an interview with Miguel Cerrillo, a Uvalde father whose
11-year-old daughter Miah survived the attack at Robb Elementary by playing dead. Cerrillo said he spoke with his daughter through the window of a bus after an officer carried her out of the school with bullet fragments in her side. The father said he rushed toward the bus as it boarded victims bound for the hospital but was prevented by officers from retrieving his daughter, who told him through a window what she'd witnessed before she was taken away for treatment.
"I panicked,"
Cerrillo told the Washington Post, saying his daughter detailed how she had watched as her teacher, Eva Mireles, was shot by the gunman while attempting to phone the police. His daughter Miah told Cerrillo she quickly grabbed the phone and called 911, and then hid from the shooter by lying down on top of one of her classmates, who had been shot and was bleeding on the ground. Her classmate was breathing but expired before help arrived, according to Cerrillo's account.
"We figured Uvalde was safe," Cerrillo told the Washington Post. "Now we know it's not safe."