I covered myself in friends’ blood to play dead
Schoolgirl, 11, who survived Texas massacre tells US politicians:
A GIRL of 11 who survived the massacre at her Texas school had politicians in tears last night as she told how she covered herself with a dead classmate’s blood to avoid being killed.
Miah Cerrillo told the US Congress via a prerecorded testimony that she saw gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, murder her teacher.
‘He told her goodnight, and shot her in the head ... and then he shot some of my classmates,’ the little girl revealed. ‘I thought he would come back so I covered myself with blood. I put it all over me and I just stayed quiet.’
She then bravely called 911 using her dead teacher’s phone and begged for help, but police in Uvalde stayed outside, convinced there was no one they could save.
In the video, Miah’s father, Miguel Cerillo, asked her if she felt safe at school. She shook her head. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want it to happen again,’ she responded.
But even as some elected officials cried, several Republicans said ‘hardening schools’ – including arming teachers – could help.
Andrew Clyde, who owns a gun store, said that one of the things he learned in his military service was that ‘the harder the target you are, the less likely you will be engaged by the enemy’.
He called on schools to keep doors locked, provide a single point of entry and ‘a volunteer force of well-trained and armed staff, in addition to a school resource officer’.
Nineteen children and two teachers died when the teenage shooter burst in and opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle.
At a White House briefing the previous evening, Hollywood star Matthew McConaughey, a Uvalde native, made an emotional speech about the need for gun control.
McConaughey, a gun owner himself, related the personal stories of a number of the victims, including Maite Rodriguez, a ten-year-old whose injuries were so catastrophic she could only be identified by her green Converse hightop shoes with a red heart drawn on them that she was wearing.
The actor and his wife travelled to Uvalde shortly after the attack at Robb Elementary School on May 24 and spent a week meeting the families of the 21 victims.
He thumped the podium in front of him as he recalled how badly injured the children were. ‘They needed extensive restoration [in the mortuary],’ he said. ‘Why? Due to the exceptionally large exit wounds of an AR-15 rifle. Most of the bodies were so mutilated that only DNA tests and green Converses could identify them.’
Yesterday was the second day legislators had heard testimony on the nation’s gun violence.
On Tuesday, a Senate panel heard from the son of an 86-yearold woman killed when a gunman opened fire in a racist attack on black shoppers in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. Ten people died.
New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney, the panel’s chairman, called the hearing to focus on the human impact of gun violence and the urgency for gun control legislation.