Washington:
An 11-year-old girl told lawmakers on Wednesday that she had smeared herself in the blood of her murdered classmate to play dead during the most horrifying in a spate of gun battles that has sent the United States convulsing.
Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, told a House committee of the times when 19 of her fellow students and two teachers were murdered by a teenage gunman last month.
She remembered her class watching a movie and scrambling behind the teacher’s desk and their backpacks when the gunman burst into the room.
“He… said ‘good night’ to my teacher, then shot her in the head. And then he shot some of my classmates and the whiteboard,” Miah said in a short but heartbreaking pre-recorded interview.
“When I went to the backpacks he shot my friend who was sitting next to me and I thought he was coming back in the room so I got some blood and smeared it all over me.”
Miah recalled being completely silent, before grabbing her late teacher’s cell phone when the moment came and calling 911.
“I told her we need help – and (we need to) see the police in our class,” she said.
Police in Uvalde have been intensively investigated after it was found that more than a dozen officers waited outside Miah’s classroom and did nothing while the children lay dead or dying.
Miah was asked what she wanted to see happen in the aftermath of the attack.
“To be safe,” she said, confirming that she feared a mass gunman would attack her school again.
“I don’t want it to happen again,” she said.
‘Ripped apart’ by gunfire
Miah — whose account of the shooting left some lawmakers in tears or wide-eyed in disbelief — has nightmares and is still healing from bullet fragments in her back, according to her father Miguel Cerrillo.
“She’s not the same little girl I used to play with,” he told the committee.
Her testimony came as Congress came under increasing pressure to respond to increasing gun violence — and especially mass shootings — across the country.
Massacres at Miah’s school and days earlier at a Buffalo, New York supermarket have shocked the nation and rekindled urgent calls for gun security reform.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee also learned of Lexi Rubio’s mother, a Robb Elementary fourth-grader who was murdered.
“We don’t want you to think of Lexi as a number. She was intelligent, compassionate and athletic,” Kimberly Rubio said via a video link, wiping her tears as she sat next to her husband Felix.
“She was quiet, shy, unless she had a point to make. When she was right, as she often was, she stood her ground. She was firm, direct, voice unwavering. So today we face Lexi and as her voice, we demand action.”
Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician who cared for several victims in Uvalde, spoke of meeting “two children whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been torn apart.”
‘Elected to protect us’
A cross-party group of senators is working on a limited collection of controls that could become their first serious attempt at gun regulation reform in decades.
The package would increase funding for mental health services and school security, narrowly expand background checks and encourage states to enact so-called “red flag laws” that allow authorities to seize weapons from individuals deemed a threat.
But it won’t include assault weapons bans or universal background checks, meaning it won’t live up to the expectations of President Joe Biden, progressive Democrats and anti-gun violence activists.
And even this compromise deal must take on the gauntlet of an evenly divided Senate and earn the votes of at least 10 Republicans, most of whom oppose sweeping regulatory reforms.
On the other side of the Capitol, House Democrats passed a much broader package of proposals late in the day, including raising the purchase age for most semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21.
Those proposals make no sense, though — they don’t have the 60 votes they would need to advance in the Senate. But Democratic leaders were eager to act after the spate of recent mass shootings.
Garnell Whitfield Jr, the son of Ruth Whitfield, victim of the Buffalo massacre, who was 86, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday about violence by whites.
“You expect us to continue to forgive and forget again and again? And what are you doing? You were chosen to protect us and protect our way of life,” the retired fire chief said in an emotional appeal to senators.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)