Uvalde school massacre: portraits of the victims<\/a><\/p>\nWhat \u2018Uvalde\u2019 used to mean<\/h2>\n To the rest of the world, \u201cUvalde\u201d means something specific now, and it always will. It means unspeakable horror. It means grief and sadness and death, the same way \u201cColumbine\u201d and \u201cNewtown\u201d and \u201cParkland\u201d do.<\/p>\n
But to those of us who grew up in the little towns nearby, what \u201cUvalde\u201d used to mean will never go away.<\/p>\n
Uvalde is where brothers and cousins and aunts raised their families. Uvalde is where tubers and campers fill their coolers on the way to Garner State Park. Uvalde is where farmers order parts for their tractors.<\/p>\n
Uvalde is where kids from all around the area ran track at the district meet and played each other in high school basketball at the Southwest Texas Junior College tournament and danced at the Purple Sage.<\/p>\n
Uvalde is where we drove beat-up little pickups to the area\u2019s closest operational movie theater, where we watched \u201cThe Fugitive\u201d and \u201cSpeed\u201d and took our time coming home, because even though we had no cell phones, our parents had no reason to worry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Uvalde was where, just two summers ago, people brought face masks and lawn chairs to a beloved resident\u2019s funeral service. This was before the COVID vaccine, which meant that seating inside Sacred Heart Catholic Church was limited. So hundreds of mourners – including some from my hometown of D\u2019Hanis – filled an open lot just a few blocks from the main town square, and figured Uvalde couldn\u2019t possibly feel more surreal than it did then.<\/p>\n
\u2018Hope for a bright light\u2019<\/h2>\n In Knippa on Wednesday afternoon, just one vehicle sat parked outside the little businesses on Highway 90. It belonged to Jill Cox, who sat at a desk in the quiet offices of Ede & Company, Certified Public Accountants, with a throw pillow in her lap.<\/p>\n
The phone wasn\u2019t ringing. Nobody needed a bookkeeper now. But somebody had to be there, just in case.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe world doesn\u2019t stop, even though you want it to,\u201d Cox said. \u201cCome to work, and hope for a bright light.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cox was born in Uvalde, grew up in Carrizo Springs, lived in Edinburg for a while, and took the job in Knippa when she moved back to the area to raise her kids.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou always feel like it\u2019s safe here,\u201d Cox said. \u201cWhen we go places, to stock shows, you feel like if your kid misbehaves, somebody else is going to be watching. \u2018Don\u2019t make me tell your mother,\u2019 you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Herrera, Cox watched the police cars and ambulances zoom past her window on Tuesday afternoon. Then came the Facebook posts and the texts and the phone calls she couldn\u2019t have imagined an hour earlier.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Her youngest daughter, Caitlyn Ledesma, a senior at Uvalde High School, said she was safe at the Sonic Drive-In, but said she couldn\u2019t leave because the roads were blocked. Then Cox heard from a friend, a first-year teacher at Robb Elementary.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said, \u2018I\u2019m in a closet with my students, and they\u2019re freaking out, and I don\u2019t know what to do,\u2019\u201d Cox said. \u201cI told her, just stay calm.\u201d<\/p>\n
But how could anyone do that? Just a day earlier, the seniors had walked through the halls of Robb in their caps and gowns, part of a Uvalde school tradition in which the graduating class is congratulated by elementary students. Now Ledesma, Cox\u2019s daughter, couldn\u2019t help thinking about the 9- and 10-year-olds whose faces had lit up as they reached up to high-five her.<\/p>\n
And those kids\u2019 parents? Cox has known some of them for what seems like forever. They were in Little League and 4H together.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow they have a child they\u2019ll never hug again,\u201d Cox said. \u201cThey have laundry in their house. When they go to fold a T-shirt, there\u2019s not going to be a kid to go with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cox still has her children, and she is proud of how her youngest has coped with this week. Ledesma and her classmates have decided it would be inappropriate to hold a graduation ceremony or to celebrate what normally would be a milestone for any teenager. Instead, Wednesday morning, she and her friend delivered boxes from the Donut Palace to the local hospital that treated victims from Robb.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me, \u2018We\u2019re forever in history now,\u2019\u201d Cox said of her daughter. \u201cShe said, \u2018This is not what I wanted Uvalde to be known for. Now it\u2019s going to be synonymous with a mass shooting of children.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2018It happened here\u2019<\/h2>\n Tuesday afternoon at D\u2019Hanis High School, details of the Robb shooting were still drifting in when Todd Craft and Jose Martinez assembled their teams for practices. Craft\u2019s baseball squad and Martinez\u2019s softballers both won state championships in 2019, and both have a chance to win another in the next couple of weeks.<\/p>\n
Craft, in his 26th year as the Cowboys\u2019 head coach, started the session by sitting his players in the dugout and letting them talk. If they needed to discuss what had happened in Uvalde, just 35 miles down the road, they could. If they wanted to go home, that was fine. But they weren\u2019t going to take the field until Craft made sure everybody was up for it.<\/p>\n
Just then, a car pulled up to the baseball field, and a woman climbed out of the driver\u2019s seat. She called out to her son, a junior on the team.<\/p>\n\n<\/p>\n <\/aside>\n<\/aside>\n
\u201cShe said she just wanted to hug him,\u201d Craft said. \u201cThat was it. And she did.\u201d<\/p>\n
That did not make this mother in D\u2019Hanis any different from mothers in Dallas or New York or Ukraine or in any of the other places where they watched the images from Robb Elementary in shock. Just as those little towns are connected to Uvalde by Highway 90, so too is the rest of the world by its shared grief.<\/p>\n
Still, in the surrounding counties, the links were more personal. Martinez, the softball coach, grew up in Sabinal. When he first read the names of the shooting victims, nothing clicked. Then he realized that one of the students was the cousin of a D\u2019Hanis player\u2019s close friend. And that one of the slain teachers had a relative who Martinez often runs into at the Hondo H-E-B.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think you don\u2019t know anybody,\u201d Martinez said. \u201cBut it turns out somebody you know does.\u201d<\/p>\n
With that in mind, the girls on Martinez\u2019s team asked him if they could wear maroon ribbons in honor of Uvalde when D\u2019Hanis plays in the state semi-finals in Austin next week. They also plan to wear \u201cUvalde Strong\u201d T-shirts during pregame warmups.<\/p>\n
Craft said D\u2019Hanis schools had extra security on Wednesday, and Martinez noticed it was on students\u2019 minds all day.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was locked down, like it normally is,\u201d Martinez said. \u201cBut you could tell, the kids came in, and they were double-checking the doors, being a little more protective. \u2026 You always think, \u2018That\u2019ll never happen here.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it happened here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018And you can\u2019t do anything\u2019<\/h2>\n Back at Nora\u2019s Tacos, Alejandra Salas tried not to think about it. She is Herrera\u2019s sister, and she showed up for work in the kitchen on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
She felt \u201ca lot of things.\u201d In some moments, despair. In others, gratitude.<\/p>\n
Tuesday morning, Salas drove her 7-year-old daughter, Adelina, to a doctor\u2019s appointment. Then, around 11 a.m., she dropped her off at the Robb <\/strong> Elementary cafeteria.<\/p>\n\u201cShe said, \u2018Mommy, I\u2019m scared. I don\u2019t want to go,\u2019\u201d Salas said. \u201cI said, \u2018Why?\u2019 She said, \u2018I don\u2019t know.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Less than an hour later, Salas got a phone call from a friend, informing her the school was locked down and there were reports of an active shooter. She raced back to the school.<\/p>\n
It was hours before she found out Adelina was OK. Later, the girl told her mother she\u2019d heard the \u201cboom-boom-boom\u201d of gunshots.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou feel like you\u2019re, how do you say it, impotente<\/em>,\u201d Salas said, using the Spanish word for powerless. \u201cYour kids are right there. And you can\u2019t do anything.\u201d<\/p>\nThis was not a feeling unique to one parent at one school.<\/p>\n
The residents of Sabinal and other little towns along Highway 90 long have been part of Uvalde.<\/p>\n
Now everyone is.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
mfinger@express-news.net<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Twitter: @mikefinge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SABINAL — Nora Herrera recognized the faces. They weren\u2019t her children, but she used to joke with their parents that they were raised on her cooking. Truck drivers from Uvalde Estates would stop by Herrera\u2019s food trailer, and they grew to love her fajitas, mollejas and potato-and-egg tacos \u2014 so much that they brought their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[45],"tags":[8209,8493,57,8494,8492],"class_list":["post-18002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ripple","tag-highway","tag-massacre","tag-ripples","tag-towns","tag-uvalde"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/rawImage.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18004,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18002\/revisions\/18004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Young](\"https:\/\/s.hdnux.com\/photos\/01\/25\/74\/02\/22528177\/3\/1200x0.jpg\")
![\"Ballons,](\"https:\/\/s.hdnux.com\/photos\/01\/25\/74\/02\/22528178\/3\/1200x0.jpg\")