The community of Uvalde, Texas, is still grieving and grappling with the horrific events of May 24, 2022, when a mass shooter killed 19 students and two teachers. One mother shared she got a phone call from the school over her surviving daughter’s ripped jeans, which was a dress code violation. She wishes the school focused more on safety.
Kimberly Mata-Rubio tweeted out a screenshot of the voicemail left by the school on October 26, 2022. She wrote: “One thing we’re not going to do is dress code my 11-year-old for some ripped jeans. UCISD, focus on school security. Maybe, if you had, my daughter, her little sister would still be alive.”
The transcript of the voicemail asks Kimberly to “please bring either another pair of pants or maybe some leggings” for her daughter. It states that she is in the office because one of the principals spotted her. “The cuts” in her jeans are "are a little too high.”
One of Kimberly’s daughters, fourth grader Alexandria Aniyah “Lexi” Rubio, was shot and killed on that tragic day. Kimberly uses her Twitter account to express her ongoing journey with grief and share memories of happier times. She also uses it to fight for and demand change so something like this never happens again.
One example is a tweet saying: “I close my eyes and speak to you often. Sometimes, in the stillness, I feel your reply," she muses. Kimberly is a 33-year-old mother of six.
Another tweet talks about how hard it is to face first holidays without Lexi. “We don’t want to do this without you. None of it,” Kimberly writes.
She goes on to say: “Not Halloween, not Christmas, not birthdays, not Mondays, not Fridays, not life. I realize this world isn’t fair but why does it have to be so cruel? .”
Kimberly and the entire Uvalde community are still grappling with the delay in police response to the incident. Almost 400 law enforcement officers arrived on the scene and waited 77 minutes before entering the school. Col. Steven McCraw, the public safety director, stated in a public meeting that the police “did not fail the community.”
Kimberly is part of an activist group called Lives Robbed, which works to fight against gun violence. It responded to McCraw’s claim. "To be clear, the Department's failures on that day are not up for debate. Our children are dead."
A Texas house committee agreed with Lives Robbed. They issued a report in July that blamed the police department and school district for “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.” Because of these findings, Pete Arredondo, Uvalde schools police chief, has been fired and the school police force has been suspended.
Kimberly sums up her raw feelings about the police failures in a tweet. She wrote: “My baby, our babies, deserved so much better. I hope their smiling faces haunt those who failed them — just as the image of my daughter, in her bright yellow casket, haunts me."
