Uvalde held a memorial for their departed just 48 hours after the tragedy at Robb Elementary School on May 24. That act was a collective catharsis after the impact of the massacre that left two teachers and 19 children dead.
Antonia Ortiz and her daughter Jackie, ten years old, remembered what happened at the end of the memorial. Jackie was one of the students in the classroom where the shooting took place. She was saved from her because a while before her, after the delivery of the end-of-year awards, she felt something inside her and preferred to go home with her mother. She will never see her friends again.
The mother was clear. “I want Jackie to go back to school, to the same one, next year.” The girl, with tears, contradicted him. “I don’t want to go back, she scares me,” she said.
A month later, Don McLaughlin, the mayor of this Texas town, has aligned himself with the fears of Jackie and other children who survived. “You can never ask a boy, or a teacher, to go back to that school.”
This was stated by the mayor at a city council meeting in which he assured that the Robb Elementary School campus should be demolished. It’s not such a strange thing. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, the city council also agreed to rebuild the school elsewhere, and the old campus disappeared from the face of the earth. There, 20 children died, almost all seven years old, and six adults. Besides the gunman, who had already murdered his mother.
The big question, can trauma be erased in this way? According to McLaughin, it is more than understandable to tear down the school and build a new one, in another location, to serve the more than 600 students it teaches. The weight of the pain is lessened, considered the mayor, if the environment does not remember what happened.
“I have had discussions with the superintendent of the school district and the school must be demolished,” he insisted. But he specified that there is still no date to apply the pickaxe.
The mayor’s proposal comes at a time when the outrage of the parents, and of Uvalde in general, is only increasing as more details of the unfortunate uniformed performance become known.
The police response to the gunman who carried out the massacre was “an abject failure,” Colonel Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday in an appearance in the state Senate.
Based on their inquiries, the security forces had a sufficient number of agents in that scene to stop the gunman Salvador Ramos within three minutes of entering the building. His neutralization did not occur until one hour and 17 minutes after his access to the premises.
McCraw assured that the head of the operation, Pete Arredondo (responsible for the school police) “chose to protect the lives of his men instead of that of the children.”
The delay in intervention has become a key issue. There were several children and a teacher who were waiting for help all this time, while the question arises as to whether an immediate intervention could have saved the lives of some of those who died. A teacher and three children died on the way to hospital.
The words of McCrawn, who three days after the tragedy already described the police operation as a disaster, add to the recognition that a uniformed officer had Ramos shot before he entered the building, but he preferred not to shoot for fear of hurt any of the children out there. The gunman already demonstrated his intentions at that moment, since he opened fire outside against the neighbors and those first policemen who arrived at the scene.
