WASHINGTON, D.C. – Video testimony from Miah Cerrillo, who survived the Uvalde mass shooting, broke hearts around the world as it was played before a House committee Wednesday. The 11-year-old smeared herself with her friend’s blood and pretended to be dead in order to survive the massacre at Robb Elementary School.
The gunman shot her teacher in the head, as well as some of her classmates, Cerrillo said. When he went into the adjacent room, Cerrillo said she got, “a little blood and I put it all over me” and stayed quiet.
She grabbed her teacher’s phone and called 911. She told them to send help, send the police.
Cerrillo said she wants to have security and is afraid to return to school. Cerrillo’s father, Miguel Cerrillo, also testified, speaking through tears. He said the shooting changed his daughter forever. “Today I come because I could have lost my baby girl,” he said. “She’s not the same little girl that I used to play with, and run around with and do everything, because she was daddy’s little girl,” he said.
Miguel Cerrillo ended with a plea, “something really needs to change.”
The testimony at the House Oversight Committee comes as lawmakers are working to strike a bipartisan agreement on gun safety measures in the aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings.
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Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician in Texas, described witnessing what he saw and heard. “I’ll never forget what I saw that day.” Dr. Guerrero went on to say, “I had heard from some of the nurses that there were two dead children who had been moved to the surgical area of the hospital.” He continued, “what I did find was something no prayer will ever relieve: Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities was blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them -- clinging for life and finding none.”
The parents of Lexi Rubio, who died in her classroom in Uvalde, also testified. Felix and Kimberly Rubio recounted finding out about their daughter’s death hours after leaving Lexi’s school awards ceremony on the morning of May 24.
Kimberly Rubio, a reporter, said she began writing about a new business in town when the office started hearing about a shooting near the elementary school. She said it wasn’t long before she received word from her son’s teacher that they were safe. But Lexi wasn’t there at the local civic center as children were reunited with their parents.
“In the reel that keeps scrolling across my memories, she turns her head and smiles back at us to acknowledge my promise and then we left,” Kimberly Rubio said. “I left my daughter at that school and that decision will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
The couple drove to the local hospital to provide her description, but she wasn’t there either. The mother of five said there came a point when “some part of me must have realized that she was gone.”
To get to the elementary school, she ran barefoot for a mile with her sandals in her hand and with her husband by her side. A firefighter eventually gave them a ride back to the civic center.
“Soon after we received the news that our daughter was among the 19 students and two teachers that died as a result of gun violence,” she said, fighting through tears.
The panel also included raw testimony from Zeneta Everhart, whose 20-year-old son Zaire was wounded in the Buffalo mass shooting.
Everhart told lawmakers it was their duty to draft legislation that protects Zaire and other Americans. She said that if they did not find the testimony moving enough to act on gun laws, they had an invitation to go to her home to help her clean her son’s wounds.
“My son Zaire has a hole in the right side of his neck, two on his back, and another on his left leg,” she said, then paused to compose herself. “As I clean his wounds, I can feel pieces of that bullet in his back. Shrapnel will be left inside of his body for the rest of his life. Now I want you to picture that exact scenario for one of your children.”