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WWALDE, Texas – The family of a 10-year-old shooting victim held a prayer circle in the courtyard here Monday when the temperatures rose and the mourners came.
Jace Luevanos’ relatives did not know what else to do, the boy said Uncle in a short interview. “As the funeral approaches, it’s getting harder and harder,” said the uncle. who speaks on condition of anonymity out of respect for the memory of his nephew.
American flags fluttered in the hot wind on Monday as Remembrance Day rose in Uwalde, a day of mourning and remembrance that this year had unattainable mourning as this cohesive city of 15,000 near the Mexican border began to burying his dead – 19 students and two teachers were shot dead at Rob Elementary School last Tuesday.
The first days of anger and grief over the senseless tragedy, aggravated by a catastrophe errors by law enforcement, concessions to the difficult but necessary period of mourning – a relentless cycle of visits, rosaries, funerals and receptions that began on Monday and will run until June 16.
Priests, who last week comforted still-bleeding children and pastors who prayed with anxious parents on Monday, turned to familiar rituals around Christian funerals. Volunteers flew in and arrived from all over Texas and across the country to help with various aspects of the funeral. Food truck operators distributed food and water. Flower boxes in the shape of a coffin “sprays”. The head of the Texas Funeral Directors Association brought in an additional funeral coach along with other undertakers – some experts in the art of facial reconstruction – to help.
The shooting with Uwalde “stirred something” in him. So he gave up his gun.
As a priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the only Catholic church in Uwalde, Father Eduardo Morales was preparing for a calendar of constant grief, a kind of schedule that can only follow an event with mass casualties like the one that rocked the nation here last Tuesday.
Morales, known as “Father Eddie,” will host a funeral after the funeral of the victims virtually every day, beginning Tuesday – sometimes two in a day, about a dozen in total.
“Everyone here knows someone who has been killed,” he told the church after Saturday’s service. “There will be many tears and many sorrows… but as we continue to celebrate their lives, they will turn into tears of joy”
Before returning to his hometown to lead the Sacred Heart six years ago, Morales buried parishioners he knew, he said. But never like that.
“I bury parishioners, but these are people I’ve known all my life – and that’s what makes things difficult,” he said.
Morales finds that he is constantly looking for the right words to say. In conversations after last week’s massacre and in speeches at the liturgy, Morales said he had tried to emphasize one thing: “It’s good to be angry,” he repeated. “But this anger cannot grow into hatred.”
On Monday, Hillcrest Memorial House – the low-lying white morgue just steps from Rob Elementary School, which housed wounded students fleeing the shooter – reopened for an afternoon visit to Amery Joe Garza, 10. Garza was an excellent student and remembered as a creative child. who kissed his 3-year-old brother every day on the way to school. This little boy is crying now, confused by his older sister’s absence, her family said.
Outside the funeral home, however, nerves erupted as mourners tried to negotiate with a group of international media outlets. A reporter tried unsuccessfully to enter the building, and police officers – some of the many law enforcement agencies outside Uwalde who rushed to the city to help local authorities – pushed reporters back into the street. Authorities have instructed the families of some victims not to speak to the media; the other local funeral home in the city, Rushing-Estes-Knowles Mortuary, posted a note on its website that read: “We respectfully ask NO to reporters or property photographers.”
A visit to Maite Rodriguez, 10, an excellent student who dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, also took place on Monday.
Police opened the road around Rob’s primary school on Monday for the first time since the killings. A steady stream of mourners, onlookers and the curious – most of them out of town – came to cry or see and photograph the makeshift memorial around the primary school sign, where white crosses mark the names of the dead. The area was covered with thousands of bouquets and toys, and on Monday people were still carrying more. A woman arrived with a plastic bag full of stuffed animals. Groups of worshipers prayed in both English and Spanish, with one man wearing a tall wooden cross.
What do the school shootings of the children who survive them, from Sandy Hook to Uwalde
The grandmother of one of the survivors cried as she described how she and the others just wanted to move on and get out of last week’s constant reminders of last week’s horrors: the media, well-meaning outsiders, the families of the victims.
“It’s too much for a young child to go through,” Betty Freyer said, tears streaming down her face, referring to her 9-year-old grandson. “We adults are also trying to stay strong for them, for our community, but that’s too much.”
Her grandson, Jaydien – who is identified only by his first name because he is a minor – said he survived the attack by hiding under a table. Now Jadien, who has a mischievous smile and loved to go to school and his math lessons, no longer wants to go to school. He doesn’t want to talk to the other children who survived.
When he hears a loud bang, he worries and is scared and can’t sleep well, his grandmother said.
“We’re just trying to borrow it and distract it so that it forgets the horror and is a happy child again,” Freyr said.
At Country Gardens & Seed, three San Antonio volunteers drove 80 miles to help store owner Yolanda Moreno were busy shaping a flower arrangements in white vaulted funeral baskets. They were out of breath, but on the floor around them were buckets of thousands of donated flowers — fragrant lilies, roses and carnations, blue delphiniums, protruding alliums, and green bells of Ireland. Moreno’s husband, Johnny, 64, went in and out several times, collecting bouquets for the delivery van.
Moreno, 62, showed a heart-shaped arrangement for Rodriguez, the ambitious marine biologist sent by a florist elsewhere in Texas, with a small fishing net and small sea urchins tucked away among the flowers – a tribute to the dream of a career the 10-year-old will never make.
All funeral arrangements will be free, Moreno said, and she is donating money to the local library to buy books in the names of the dead students.
“It’s for the little boy, isn’t it?” Asked volunteer Amanda Melton, 37, an event organizer in San Antonio, gesturing to one of the arrangements. “And what do you want it written on the map?”
“Made with love,” Moreno said.
As the schedule unfolded, police criticized the school’s massacre response
Early Monday morning, a 47-year-old carpenter named Robert Ramirez made his daily pilgrimage to his father’s grave in Uwalde City Cemetery, where the graves were strewn with small American flags. Ramirez, who had put the carpenter’s pencil behind one ear, had brought his father two Miller Lite beers and placed them on his grave in honor of the day. The beers were still cold.
Ramirez said many people in Uwalde are frustrated and angry with the reaction of law enforcement to the shooting, and that people in the city want employees who failed to stop him to be fired.
“They gave the shooter 90 minutes to do whatever he wanted, and he killed all these little boys and girls,” Ramirez said. “It was so sad. They were just getting ready for summer. Two days.”
While visiting his father, Ramirez said he should think about all this dirt and grass in the back of the cemetery, where many of the funerals are likely to take place in the coming days. They must bury all the victims there, he said, and build a large memorial in their name.
“This is the perfect place,” he said, pointing to a patch of grass. “They all died together; they must be together. “
Paulina Villegas of Uvalde contributed to this report.
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