A reflex to survive. An 11-year-old student survivor of a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday said she smeared herself in blood and played dead to escape the shooter. In a testimony to the CNN channel, not filmed and without direct quote, Miah Cerrillo said he used the mobile phone of a dead teacher to call the police and ask them to intervene in the case of the 18-year-old, who massacred a total of 19 children and 2 teachers. This is the first known testimony from a survivor of this shooting.
That morning, she and her classmates were watching the cartoon lilo and stitch when the two teachers, Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, learned that there was a shooter in the school. One of them, says the student, tried to close the classroom door, but the shooter, Salvador Ramos, was already there. Everything happened very quickly, she says: he looked at the teacher, said “good night” to her, then shot her, before shooting her colleague and then some students. Miah was injured in the shoulder and head by shrapnel.
“Come on, please… we have a problem”
Then, continues the student, the shooter opened a door leading to a second class. She heard shots, screams. Salvador Ramos puts music on speakerphone – sad music, according to Miah Cerrillo. With the phone of the deceased teacher, the little girl and a friend beg the police to intervene: “Come on, please… we have a problem”.
Frightened with a few other surviving students of a return of the shooter to their class, she says that she dipped her hands in the blood of a comrade, whose corpse was next to her, to smear it all over her and play dead. She thought then, she said, that the police had still not arrived on the scene. Later, she recalls to the American channel, she heard the police arrive outside.
Let people know what happened
Miah continued, in tears, saying she couldn’t understand why the police hadn’t come to save them. She told CNN she was too scared to speak to a man or on camera, but wanted people to know what happened in that classroom.
Tufts of hair have been falling out of his head ever since. His parents have launched an online kitty to finance his medical and psychological follow-up.
