Jasmine Carrillo, 29, was working in the cafeteria with about 40 sophomores and two teachers when the attack began. The lights were dimmed – part of a schoolwide lockdown that had gone into effect.
As he entered the fourth-grade building, Ms. Carrillo said, the gunman slammed and kicked the door of her 10-year-old son Mario’s classroom and demanded to be allowed in. But he couldn’t open the locked door.
Instead, he moved to others.
In the connected classrooms, room 111 and room 112, two teachers, Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, had also shown a movie, “Lilo & Stitch”, as the students finished their classes. One of the teachers moved to close the door and close the classroom from the hallway. But the shooter was already there.
Miah Cerrillo (11) watched as her teacher backed into the classroom and followed the gunman. He shot first one teacher, then the other. She said he shot many students in her classroom, then went to the adjacent one and opened fire, her grandfather, Jose Veloz, 71, said as he relayed the girl’s story.
Then he started shooting wildly.
The terrifying echo of at least 100 gunshots rattled through the school as children in the classrooms and both teachers there were shot and fell to the floor. It was 11:33 am
Not all the children inside were killed in that horrific moment. Several survived and huddled in terror next to their limp friends. One of the children fell on Miah’s chest as she lay on the floor, her grandfather said. Terrified that he would return to her class, Miah said, she took the blood of a classmate who dropped dead and rubbed it all over herself. Then she played herself to death.
Two minutes after the gunman first entered the pair of classrooms, several police officers from the Uvalde Police Department stormed into the school. A few officers approached the locked door to the classrooms when gunshots were heard inside. The two were hit – scrapes, as their injuries would later be described – when bullets pierced the door and hit them in the hallway.
