Ángel Garza is a paramedic, so when he heard there was a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, he rushed to help. “One girl was covered in blood from head to toe. I thought she was hurt, I asked her what happened. She told me she was fine… She was hysterical and said that her best friend had been shot, that they had killed her best friend, who was no longer breathing,” a very emotional Garza told CNN reporter Anderson Cooper on Wednesday.
“I asked the girl her name, and…she said: Amerie.” This is how this devastated father discovered that his 10-year-old daughter was one of the victims of the massacre that took the lives of 19 children and two teachers in a small town in Texas last Tuesday, perpetrated by an armed 18-year-old boy with two semi-automatic rifles.
Amerie died trying to call the police. “I just want people to know that she died trying to save her classmates,” says the father, “she wanted to save them all.”
Another of the most viral and moving images of the Texas massacre is that of the Sheriff’s deputy, Félix Rubio, who, like Garza, went to school as a professional to discover that his daughter Kimberly was one of the victims. In the photograph he is seen with a lost look while a group of neighbors comforts his wife, broken in pain.
The Sheriff’s deputy has asked on CNN that his daughter “not be a number.” “That’s enough. No one should have to go through this,” he said, “we didn’t have to go through this, but here we are. Violence, weapons. I’m a police officer, enough of this.”
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