“We will not return to this campus,” Harrell said during a special board meeting, adding that he hopes to have a new address for the school in the “very near future.”
The superintendent’s calmness followed a weeping mother who spoke to the panel and begged for second graders to attend Robb Elementary to be moved, saying through tears that her son had been traumatized by violence.
“My son has a deadly fear of school now,” the mother said. “What he knows now is that when he goes to another school he will be shot by a bad man.”
As a traumatized community suffers senseless violence, many questions remain about the massacre, and authorities have often given conflicting information about exactly how the attack unfolded. Among the unclear details: how the gunman entered.
Initially, the Texas Department of Homeland Security said a teacher had opened a door, only to say later that the teacher closed the door when she realized there was a shooter on campus.
A teacher who made peace with death
Emilia Marin, an elementary school educator, was walking out of school on May 24 to help a co-worker bring food for an end-of-year party when she saw a car accident, according to her lawyer .
What followed would be “the most horrible thing anyone could have endured,” his attorney, Don Flanary, told CNN.
Marin entered the school to report the accident and had left the door open with a rock, according to Flanary, who is assisting Marin with a possible civil claim against the gun manufacturers used in the killing.
When Marin returned to the door – still in line with 911 operators – she saw her co-worker running away and heard people on the other side of a funeral home shouting, “She has a gun! “
Marin saw the gunman approaching, Flanary said, so she kicked the door shut and ran to a nearby adjoining classroom, huddled under a counter.
It was there that Marin heard gunshots, Flanary said; first outdoors, then inside the school. Your 911 call was disconnected. He grabbed chairs and then boxes to help hide his location. She tried to stay still.
“Frozen” by fear, Marin received a text message from her daughter asking if she was safe. “There’s a shooter. He’s firing. He’s here,” Marin said, according to his lawyer. Moments later, Marin wrote that he could hear the police.
Marin had to mute her phone, convinced that the gunman would hear her, said her lawyer, who added that she heard “every shot” fired at the school.
“She thought he would come in and kill her, and she made peace with it,” Flanary said. “She thought she wouldn’t make it out alive.”
The gunman pointed to another classroom and never met Marin, his lawyer said. Her grandson, who is a student at Robb Elementary, was also elsewhere and survived. However, Marin’s ordeal soon worsened in the days following the shooting after authorities said the gunman entered the school through a door left open.
“She felt lonely, like she couldn’t even cry,” Flanary said. “She guessed, like, ‘Didn’t I?’ ” added.
DPS later clarified that the shooter had entered through an unlocked door. The whole experience, however, has affected his mental health, Flanary said. He had to see a neurologist because “he can’t stop shaking,” he said.
Fanary said investigators told Marin, “No, we watched the video, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Asked if Marin would return to the classroom, Flanary said, “I don’t think she can ever set foot on a school campus again.”
Although Marin has no plans to sue the school, police or the school district, Flanary said, a petition was filed on Thursday to dismiss Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the firearm used in the attack, according to a court document obtained by CNN.
The pre-lawsuit does not charge the gun manufacturer with any crime, but seeks to investigate whether the petitioner has any basis for filing a claim against Daniel Defense. CNN has contacted Daniel Defense to get his response to the presentation.
“There are many bodies”
Butcher details continue to appear more than a week later.
A Robb Elementary student on the day of the shooting called 911 for her life and her teacher’s, according to a transcript of the call reviewed by the New York Times.
“There are a lot of bodies,” Khloie Torres, a 10-year-old student, told the dispatcher, according to the newspaper.
The call was made at 12:10 p.m., more than 30 minutes after the shooting inside the school began.
“I don’t want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help, send help to my teacher, she is shot but still alive.” Torres said, according to the Times transcript review.
The call lasted 17 minutes and 11 minutes later, the sound of a shot could be heard, the Times reported.
The victim’s father also asks the weapons manufacturer for answers
On Friday, the lawyers for the father of the victim of the shooting, Amerie Jo Garza, 10, also asked the weapons manufacturer for answers.
A letter issued on behalf of Alfred Garza III called on the maker of the AR-15-style rifle used in the massacre to provide all the marketing information, especially the strategy aimed at teenagers and children, according to a statement from lawyers.
The statement says Garza’s Texas attorneys, Mikal Watts and Charla Aldous, have teamed up with Josh Koskoff, who represented nine Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting families in a $ 73 million settlement against Remington. the manufacturer of the AR-15 used in the 2012 school shooting.
“She wants me to do everything I can, so this will never happen to any other child,” Alfred Garza III said in a statement. “I have to fight his fight.”
In addition to marketing and advertising strategies, Georgia-based Daniel Defense attorneys ask for relevant information “for your incitement and encouragement of the aggressive use of these weapons; for your online shopping system. and for your communications, on any platform, with the Uvalde shooter, and in your awareness of the previous use of AR-15 style rifles in mass shootings. “
“Daniel Defense has said they are praying for the Uvalde families. They should support these prayers with meaningful actions,” Koskoff said.
Lawyers representing Garza’s mother, Kimberly Garcia, also sent a letter to Daniel Defense, demanding that the company “preserve all potentially relevant information” related to the shooting, which includes, among other things, “all potentially relevant physical, electronic and documentary evidence for the marketing of the AR-15 style rifle business.
Daniel Defense has not responded to several CNN requests for comment.
On his website, Daniel Defense said he would “cooperate with all federal, state and local law enforcement authorities in his investigations” and referred to the Uvalde shooting as an “act of evil.”
Preliminary death certificates for 20 victims show that they died from gunshot wounds, according to the peace judge of the county of Uvalde. CNN is awaiting an additional victim report. The shooter also died from gunshot wounds.
Survivors of the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings to testify
Next week, survivors and others affected by the recent shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde will testify before the House Oversight Committee, according to the committee’s website. An 18-year-old gunman opened fire on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on May 14, killing 10 people in a racist attack.
Witnesses for next Wednesday’s committee hearing will include Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary; Felix Rubio and Kimberly Rubio, 10-year-old daughter Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio was murdered at Robb Elementary; Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured in Buffalo; and Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician from Uvalde. Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia will also testify.
The announcement of the Washington hearing came on the same day that a Texas state lawmaker set up a committee to “conduct an examination of the circumstances” surrounding Uvalde’s shooting.
“The fact that we still don’t have an accurate picture of exactly what happened in Uvalde is outrageous,” Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan said in a statement Friday.
Texas Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican, Joe Moody, a Democrat, and Texas Supreme Court Retired Judge Eva Guzman, a Republican, have been appointed to the committee.
The state senator is asking for more answers
Investigators from local, state and federal agencies say they are working to determine more about the circumstances behind the Uvalde shooting.
Search orders have been issued for the mobile phone, vehicle and home of his grandparents in the shooter, according to court records obtained by CNN. The order gives investigators the authority to conduct a forensic discharge of the cell phone – which was next to his body – in search of a motive.
However, criticism continues as to whether the authorities responded quickly enough to neutralize the gunman, as well as the lack of transparency of some police officers after the shooting. According to a timeline published by the Texas DPS, the children made several 911 calls inside the classroom where a gunman was located, all while police were parked outside the room. A Texas lawmaker asked questions at a news conference Thursday about whether information about 911 calls from inside Robb Elementary had been properly passed on to law enforcement officials at the scene.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez said he spoke with the 911 State Emergency Communications Agency, and was told that 911 calls were handled and relayed to city police. at the scene. What is unclear, however, is whether the information was passed on to the school district police chief, who was the commander of the incident at the scene.
“They were being communicated to a police officer from Uvalde and the state agency I spoke to did not tell me who …