A survivor from the Texas school shooting in Uvalde revealed that the gunman who murdered 19 children and two teachers inside a locked classroom played ‘sad’ music while he opened fire.
In an interview with CNN producer Nora Neus, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo provided chilling new details about what went on inside her fourth-grade classroom in the moments before and during 18-year-old Salvador Ramos’s shooting rampage.
The 11-year-old conducted the interview off-air with Ms Neus, as her mother said she wasn’t comfortable speaking on air, and the news station also added that the wounded child insisted that she’d only speak with women, because she was still “so scared of men … because of what happened”.
In the gripping account, Ms Neus relayed how the scarring Tuesday afternoon had actually begun quite normally, with the teachers combining the fourth and fifth graders for a screening of Lilo and Stitch, a treat to ring in the last week of classes before summer break.
“One of her teachers [then] got an email that there was a shooter in the building and went to the door and he was right there,” Ms Neus relayed on Miah’s behalf.
The teacher, who Miah did not specify the identity of, made eye contact with Ramos before he shot through the window of the door to let himself through and begin what Miah described to the CNN producer as a carnage that “happened all so fast”.
“He backed the teacher into the classroom, and he made eye contact with the teacher again, looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Goodnight,’ and then shot her and killed her,” Ms Neus said on Miah’s behalf.
Eva Mireles, 44, and Irma Garcia, 46, were the two faculty members who died trying to save their students’ lives during Tuesday’s attack.
Her fourth-grade classroom adjoined to another classroom, and it was when the gunman made his way into that section that Miah heard, amid the screams and gunfire, an unsettling sound.
“And then she said she heard music,” Ms Neus said, adding that Miah believed it was the gunman that put it on. “He started blasting sad music.”
When the producer pressed Miah a bit more about what she meant by ‘sad’ music, the 11-year-old said she couldn’t describe it other than something that sounded like “I want people to die music”.
The student then described to the producer how she engaged in a grim but potentially life-saving act: she put the blood from a friend of hers, who she deduced was likely dead from the amount she was bleeding out and smeared it on her body so as to appear dead to the gunman.
She and a friend then went over to one of the teachers who had already been killed and managed to get her cellphone from her pocket and managed to dial out to 911 and make contact with a dispatcher.
Miah told Ms Neus that she and the friend just kept telling the dispatcher “We’re in trouble, we’re in trouble” and “please come, please come”.
By the child’s account, she told the CNN producer that she felt like she’d been inside the bloody classroom for “what felt like three hours”.
The producer then asked the girl what she thought the police were doing at the time, and, by the 11-year-old’s impression inside the classroom, she believed “the police just hadn’t gotten there yet”.
Ms Neus pointed out at this point that the child had remained mostly stoic throughout their interview, but when they began talking about the police response, she became visibly upset.
“I heard the grownups later say the police were outside and that they weren’t coming in,” Ms Neus said Miah told her, adding that the 11-year-old seemed unable to comprehend as she kept asking: “why didn’t they come in, why didn’t they save us.”
According to a Texas state police official, officers waited nearly an hour for back-up before entering her fourth grade classroom at Robb Elementary School because they reportedly worried they “could’ve been shot.”
Lt Chris Olivarez from the Texas Department of Public Safety during an interview with CNN on Thursday that after the first few officers attempted to breach the classroom but were met with gunfire, they retreated for fear of being shot and killed.
“It was the wrong decision. There’s no excuse for that,” Steven C McCraw, Director and Colonel of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference on Friday.
The police response to the active shooter situation in Uvalde on Tuesday afternoon has come under attack from parents and family members, some of whom were pinned down and handcuffed by officers outside the school as they angrily shouted at them to go inside.
“The police were doing nothing,” Angeli Rose Gomez, who was handcuffed and told she was under arrest for trying to intervene in an active investigation, told the Wall Street Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
A GoFundMe has been set up by Miah’s mother, Abigale Veloz, so that she can get the mental health support to help her daughter cope with the violent images and grave actions she had to undertake on Tuesday to secure her survival. As of Friday afternoon, the fundraiser had collected more than $110,000 (£87,200).
