Hours after an award ceremony celebrating excellent students, just two days before the end of the school year, families of students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, lived every parent's worst nightmare.
An 18-year-old shooter barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom in the building after exchanging fire with police outside of the building. Police were allegedly engaging the suspect after reports he shot his grandmother. Armed with an assault rifle, the young man opened fire, killing 19 children and two teachers before officers took his life. It is the deadliest elementary school shooting since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which took the lives of 20 children and seven adults.
The chaos of the scene had officials urging parents not to come to the school. Instead, families were redirected to the Willie de Leon Civic Center. Throughout the late afternoon and into the evening, kids slowly trickled out in the arms of their loved ones. For some families, however, the night went much longer. The families of unaccounted-for students were asked for DNA samples to help authorities identify which remaining children were wounded in area hospitals and which were dead.
Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, noted the timeline of events. It appears the shooter shot his grandmother, whom he lived with, then drove to Robb Elementary School. He crashed his car in a ditch outside of the school and got out with a backpack and a rifle. Officers engaged him in gunfire, but he was able to get entry into the school and barricade himself in a fourth-grade classroom.
US Customs and Border Protection provided backup at the scene, with one agent being injured during the outside altercation. It is unclear how many other injured parties are hospitalized from the incident altogether.
The Uvalde school district has canceled the remainder of the school year. Staff is working with local resources to allow for free grief counseling at the civic center, which has served as the reunification center.
The scenes at that civic center were heartbreaking on the evening of May 24. There, families were either reunited with their children, told that their children were at a local medical center or one in San Antonio, or given the heartbreaking news that their child had died.
"We see people coming out just terrorized. They're crying one by one. They're being told that their child has passed on," state Senator Roland Gutierrez told CNN.
Uvalde County Commissioner Ronnie Garza, who has lived in the area his whole life, was overtaken by the tragedy.
"Our community is about faith and hard work," he told Austin American-Statesman reporter Niki Griswold.
"And this has really come as a shock to us. We just never thought of something like this hitting our community."
At nightfall, quite a few families were still awaiting word on their children. This was agonizing considering the shooting occurred at 11:32 a.m. CST. Some of the remaining families met with law enforcement, who asked them to consent to providing DNA samples that could help identify victims.
Condolences from the community have come from all around the country. Perhaps most heartbreakingly, many have come from other families who have endured this type of tragedy.
"I can't stop thinking about these families today who need to figure out how they're going to bury their children, who need to figure out how they are going to console their other children," Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jamie was one of the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, told CNN.
"And I can't stop thinking about this community that needs to figure out how they're all going to rally, how they're all going to take care of one another in this aftermath."
