Uvalde official identifies victims he knew personally in deadliest US school shooting since Sandy Hook

Eulalio Diaz Jr. stepped into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, hours after a gunman had finished his work there. On the floor lay nineteen children and two teachers, all dead. Diaz, the county's justice of the peace, had come to do what Uvalde's lack of a medical examiner required of him: identify the bodies and return them to their families.

The first person he recognized was Irma Garcia, one of the two teachers killed. She had been a year behind him at Uvalde High School. They had moved through junior high and high school together. Around her lay the bodies of fourth-graders whose parents were his friends. In a town of sixteen thousand people, where everybody knows everybody, the ripples of that knowledge spread instantly. That night, Diaz went home and opened Facebook to find messages from people he had known for decades—parents and grandparents of the children he had just identified.

The work itself was grueling in ways that went beyond the obvious horror. Children do not carry identification. Many of the bodies were too severely damaged for visual recognition. Diaz tried to spare the families additional trauma by asking parents to describe the clothes their children had worn to school that day, or by examining photographs they brought him. It was not enough. The Texas Rangers ordered DNA swabs from family members. The identification process stretched on, each confirmation another small death for the people waiting outside.

The shooting had begun around noon on Tuesday, May 24th, when eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school and emerged with an AR-15-style rifle. He fired at two people outside a nearby funeral home—both escaped uninjured. He encountered a school district security officer, then fired on two arriving Uvalde police officers, wounding them both. He then entered the building, found a classroom, locked the door behind him, and began shooting. The gunfire lasted somewhere between forty minutes and an hour. Witnesses standing outside the school—parents, neighbors, bystanders—shouted at police officers to go inside. "Go in there! Go in there!" women yelled. The officers did not enter. Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter Jacklyn was inside that locked classroom, arrived at the school while police were still gathered outside. Frustrated and desperate, he discussed with other bystanders the possibility of rushing in themselves. "There were more of them," he said later. "There was just one of him." Law enforcement officials later said that Border Patrol agents had difficulty breaching the classroom door and had to obtain a key from a staff member. When they finally entered, they killed Ramos.

What had driven an eighteen-year-old with no known criminal history and no documented mental health problems to do this remained unclear. But the timeline of his actions that day was becoming visible. About thirty minutes before he arrived at the school, Ramos sent the first of three messages via Facebook. He wrote that he was going to shoot his grandmother. Then he wrote that he had shot her. In the final message, sent about fifteen minutes before he reached Robb Elementary, he announced his intention to shoot up an elementary school. His grandmother, wounded in the initial shooting at their shared home, survived and was hospitalized. Ramos had legally purchased two rifles just days earlier, right after his eighteenth birthday.

The dead included Eliahna Garcia, a ten-year-old who loved to sing, dance, and play basketball. Xavier Javier Lopez, another fourth-grader, had been looking forward to a summer of swimming. Eva Mireles, one of the teachers, was married to an officer with the school district's police department. Nineteen children and two teachers in total. At least seventeen others were wounded. The attack was the deadliest school shooting in the United States since Sandy Hook, where twenty children and six adults were killed in December 2012.

The tragedy arrived in a nation already reeling from gun violence. Ten days earlier, a gunman had killed ten Black people in a racist attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Now the debate over firearms erupted again, with predictable fault lines. Texas Governor Greg Abbott emphasized mental health struggles among young people and pointed to the ineffectiveness of stricter gun laws in other states. Democrat Beto O'Rourke, running against Abbott for governor, interrupted a news conference to say the tragedy was predictable and placed responsibility directly at Abbott's feet. "This is on you," O'Rourke said, pointing, "until you choose to do something different." He was escorted out as some in the room shouted him down. President Biden said the Second Amendment was not absolute and called for new gun restrictions. But the prospects for reform remained dim. Repeated attempts over the years to expand background checks and enact other curbs had foundered on Republican opposition in Congress. Texas, with some of the nation's most gun-friendly laws, had been the site of some of America's deadliest shootings in recent years.

Diaz, sitting in his office at the Uvalde County Courthouse, spoke of his hope that the very closeness of the community—the fact that everyone knew everyone—would also help them heal. "We all feel such anguish," he said. "But we all are here to support one another." It was a fragile hope, built on the bonds of a small town that had just experienced an unimaginable fracture.