Uvalde Elementary School Shooting: Shooting at Elementary School Devastates Community in South Texas (Published 2022) (2024)

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19 children and two adults are killed in a Texas elementary school shooting, the authorities say.

The slayings took place just before noon at Robb Elementary School, where second through fourth graders in Uvalde, a small city west of San Antonio, were preparing to start summer break this week. At least one teacher was among the adults killed, and several other children were wounded.

The gunman, whom the authorities identified as an 18-year-old man who had attended a nearby high school, was armed with several weapons, officials said. He also died at the scene, they said.

“He shot and killed horrifically, incomprehensibly,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news conference.

As terrified parents in Uvalde waited for word of their children’s safety and law enforcement officials raced to piece together how the attack had transpired, the mass shooting was deepening a national political debate over gun laws and the prevalence of weapons. Ten days earlier, a gunman fatally shot 10 people inside a Buffalo grocery store.

“This is just evil,” Rey Chapa, an Uvalde resident, said of Tuesday’s killings while using an expletive. Mr. Chapa said his nephew was in the school when the shooting took place but was safe. He was waiting to hear back from relatives and friends on the conditions of other children, scrolling through Facebook for updates. “I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.”

Across the street from the school, state troopers were scattered across the school lawn and an ambulance idled with its lights flashing. Adolfo Hernandez, a longtime Uvalde resident, said his nephew had been in a classroom near where the shooting took place.

“He actually witnessed his little friend get shot in the face,” Mr. Hernandez said. The friend, he said, “got shot in the nose and he just went down, and my nephew was devastated.”

In a brief address from the White House on Tuesday night, President Biden grew emotional as he reflected on the attack and called for action, but did not advocate for a particular policy or vote.

“It’s just sick,” he said of the sorts of weapons that are easily available in the United States and used in mass shootings. “Where in God’s name is our backbone, the courage to do more and then stand up to the lobbies? It’s time to turn this pain into action.”

Mr. Biden later added, “May the Lord be near to the brokenhearted and save those crushed in spirit, because they’re going to need a lot.”

The shooting took place on Election Day in Texas, as voters across the state headed to the polls for primary runoffs that would set the stage for the November election at a time when the state and the nation have been riven by political disagreements over race, immigration and abortion.

As the deadly toll became known, the events at Robb Elementary School immediately brought forth wrenching memories of the devastating 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Conn., that left six staff members and 20 children dead, some as young as 6 years old. Six years later, a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Lydia Martinez Delgado said that her niece Eva Mireles, a teacher of fourth graders at the school, was among those who had died in the rampage. Ms. Mireles had been a teacher for 17 years, her aunt said, and was “very loved,” an avid hiker and took pride in teaching mostly students of Latino heritage. “She was the fun of the party,” Ms. Martinez Delgado said.

For many, the weight of the tragedy appeared to be compounded by its arrival so soon after a deadly mass killing of Black shoppers in a grocery store in Buffalo, in what was one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history. It had been the deadliest shooting in the United States this year until Tuesday’s killings in Uvalde.

Mr. Abbott said that the shooter was a resident of the same county where the shooting took place, that he attended high school there and that he had acted alone. He entered the elementary school with a handgun and possibly a rifle, the governor said.

It was not immediately clear whether the shooting took place in one classroom or several and officials did not release the names or ages of the students killed or of the teacher. At least three children — a 9-year-old and two 10-year-olds, one in critical condition — were taken to University Health, a hospital in San Antonio, for treatment.

Officials were looking into whether the gunman, whom they identified as Salvador Ramos, had been targeting the school or whether he ended up there by chance, according to a law enforcement official, who requested anonymity to describe the investigation that he cautioned was still unfolding. The gunman appeared to have crashed a pickup truck through a barrier at the school before heading inside, the official said. At least two law enforcement officials who had tried to engage the gunman were injured in the shooting, neither seriously, the official said.

Marsha Espinosa, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said at least one agent with the U.S. Border Patrol was wounded after responding to the shooting at Robb Elementary School. “Upon entering the building, Agents & other law enforcement officers faced gun fire from the subject, who was barricaded inside,” she wrote on Twitter.

Shortly before the massacre, a 66-year-old woman was shot in her home in Uvalde, the official said, and later airlifted to a San Antonio hospital with gunshot wounds. The official said the woman appeared to have been the gunman’s grandmother and had been shot before the shooting at the school; both shootings, and the connection between them, remained under investigation.

The shooting took place just after 11:30 a.m. For much of the afternoon, as word spread, anguished parents were instructed by the district to stay away from the school. “Please do not pick up students at this time,” the school district instructed parents, directing them to a local civic center. “Students need to be accounted for before they are released to your care.”

Parents and relatives scrambled for any information as news of a shooter at the school turned into the realization that so many children had been killed.

Ryan Ramirez told KSAT in San Antonio that he could not find his daughter, a fourth grader at Robb Elementary, when he showed up at the school or at a reunification point at a civic center. “Nobody’s telling me anything,” he said, adding, “I’m trying to find out where my baby’s at.”

Even before much was known about the gunman, his motives or details about the weapons he used, the killings thrust the debate over gun control and Second Amendment rights back into the forefront of national attention.

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and an advocate for gun control legislation, said, “I think everybody here is going to be shaken to the core by this.” He added: “I have no idea how a community deals with this. There’s no way to do this well. Your community is never ever the same after this.”

The National Rifle Association is set to hold its annual meeting in Houston starting on Friday. Mr. Abbott is among the list of prominent Republicans slated to appear, along with former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz.

“Today is a dark day,” Mr. Cruz said in a statement. In messages posted to Twitter he said the nation had “seen too many of these shootings,” but he did not immediately call for any specific policy proposals to help prevent mass killings.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat whose effort at legislation on background checks for gun purchases was blocked in 2013, said, “It makes no sense at all why we can’t do common-sense things and try to prevent some of this from happening.”

Joaquin Castro, a U.S. representative for Texas, described Uvalde, which has about 15,000 residents, as a “wonderful, tight-knit community.” In the neighborhood around the school, more than 40 percent of residents have lived in the same house for at least 30 years, census data shows.

Robb Elementary serves more than 500 students, mostly between the ages of 7 and 10. Roughly 90 percent of the students are Hispanic, according to district records, and almost all of the rest are white.

A sign hanging from the brick school building near the edge of the city center reads “Welcome!” and “¡Bienvenidos!” next to the school’s logo, a heart.

Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Emily Cochrane, Jacey Fortin, Robert Gebeloff, Jesus Jiménez, Alyssa Lukpat, Eduardo Medina, Sarah Mervosh and Michael D. Shear.

Biden calls for action after Texas shooting, but faces limits of his power.

That was almost 10 years ago.

When 19 more children were killed by a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, Mr. Biden, now the president, repeated his own call for the government to do something, decrying “another massacre” and insisting that it was “time to turn this pain into action.”

But a decade after Republicans blocked gun safety legislation in response to the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Biden remains caught between a desire to honor the dead by vowing to act and the reality that he cannot deliver on sweeping promises without consensus in Congress.

Mr. Biden said on Wednesday that he would visit Uvalde in the coming days, saying that “the idea that an 18-year-old can walk into a store and buy weapons of war designed and marketed to kill is, I think, just wrong.”

But in brief remarks, he did not even repeat his call for Congress to require universal background checks for firearm purchases or to pass a ban on the kind of military-style weapon that the shooter used in Texas, positions he has often taken in the past. He asked only for what he called a “modest” step: voting to approve his nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“The Senate should confirm him without delay, without excuse,” Mr. Biden said as he signed a separate executive order on police reform.

White House officials said the president was under no illusions that the Senate would pass gun safety legislation given continued opposition by Republicans, who argue that restrictions violate Second Amendment rights and would not stop shootings like the one in Texas.

Mr. Biden’s staff said there were real limits on the executive power a president can wield, even in moments of national grief. He cannot ban military-style weapons or raise the age to purchase a rifle; such actions would require passing legislation in Congress.

Instead, aides to Mr. Biden said he remained focused on redefining the terms of the fiercely polarized debate — making the argument less about a “shock and awe” response to the latest mass killing of children and more about a slow but methodical approach to reducing gun-related deaths, including those that happen every day on the streets of the country’s biggest cities.

White House officials point to a steady stream of accomplishments since taking office, including regulating untraceable “ghost guns” that can be made at home, providing $10 billion for community policing, working to reduce firearm suicides among veterans, creating prison re-entry programs to ensure former inmates do not have access to guns and stepping up enforcement of gun trafficking laws.

The president is “doing more through executive action in his first year in office than any president in history,” Michael Gwin, a White House spokesman, said.

Mr. Biden has not announced plans for a splashy new task force to confront mass shootings, nor has he pledged to barnstorm the country pressing for legislation demanded by activists for years. Instead, Mr. Gwin said efforts would continue inside the West Wing, where more than a dozen staff members working for the Domestic Policy Council and others are seeking to churn out more ways to curb the use of guns in violent crimes.

“We’re continuing to look at every tool we have to stop gun violence, with new urgency,” Mr. Gwin said.

But those efforts can appear insignificant in moments of extreme tragedy, like the one that erupted in Texas on Tuesday. Mr. Biden’s modest proposal during his remarks on Wednesday contrasted sharply with the demands for more aggressive action by some lawmakers, activists, family members of victims and others.

“Our job is not to send thoughts and prayers, our job is to pass laws,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who witnessed Newtown’s pain, told reporters at the Capitol.

For Mr. Biden, the limitations on presidential authority — and the disappointment with legislative roadblocks — go back decades.

As a senator, he helped pass a ban on assault weapons in 1994, only to see it expire a decade later when Congress refused to renew it. As vice president in 2013, he led the effort to win bipartisan support for universal background checks, but that effort, too, failed in the face of opposition from Republicans and a handful of Democrats in the Senate.

People who worked with Mr. Biden on that effort a decade ago said on Wednesday that he learned some lessons from the experience.

“He is in an incredibly difficult conundrum,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a Democratic think tank, who worked with Mr. Biden’s team in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting. “He is the leader of the majority party in Congress and yet he can’t get them to do some of the very things that he views as enormously important.”

Mr. Bennett said Mr. Biden learned the value of executive actions after Newtown, when he was asked to come up with a list of steps that President Barack Obama could take in addition to the push for legislation. Mr. Obama announced a series of such actions, but they were overshadowed by the failure of the legislation four months after the shooting.

“They uncovered every rock in the federal registry and they did everything they possibly could by executive order,” Mr. Bennett said. “There is no more to be done. He can’t do anything more with his own authority.”

John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a leading gun control group, disagrees and said he still believed there was more that could be done without Congress. He urged Mr. Biden to change the way gun sellers are defined by the government so that more of them would be required to conduct background checks — without the need for congressional approval.

Mr. Feinblatt conceded that meaningful gun safety legislation was unlikely, saying “we’ve got a 50-50 Senate, which is not a majority in my book.”

But he praised Mr. Biden for taking action on his own. In particular, he said the president’s efforts to regulate ghost guns would prevent scores of gun-related deaths by preventing criminals from having access to the made-at-home weapons.

“Quite frankly, I think the ghost guns is as big a threat as I’ve seen, you know, in all my years working on this,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “He took on an industry and he won, and so I think he gets significant credit for it.”

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement group, recalled being part of a meeting with Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama’s cabinet shortly after the Newtown shooting.

“I think, if you’ve been around in Washington for a while, there’s a sense of despair because you know how important this issue is, but it’s this herculean effort to get consensus,” Mr. Wexler recalled. “And I think that’s the sense I felt in the room.”

Mr. Wexler, who was at the White House on Wednesday for the signing of the police reform order, said he thought Mr. Biden understood that not much had changed in the political environment over the last decade.

“There’s solutions, you know, that tend to be similar time after time, and there’s this enormous energy right after the event,” Mr. Wexler said. “And it just, over time, disappears, dissipates.”

In the aftermath of the Texas shooting, Mr. Biden took to Twitter to call for “action” and to pose a series of questions: “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby?”

“What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?”

He did not offer any answers.

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What we know about the victims of the Uvalde shooting.

Maite was the only girl in her family, and was happy all her life, her mother said.

“If there was a picture of loving,” Ms. Rodriguez said, “it would be a picture of her.”

Maite was focused, ambitious and determined, her mother said. Before the pandemic, she was a straight-A student. Her grades slipped a bit during the pandemic, but she was working hard to turn that around. On the morning of the shooting, she received an award for making the school’s A-B Honor Roll and won recognition for being a computer wizard.

Since kindergarten, Maite had dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. One day she surprised Ms. Rodriguez by announcing that she wanted to go to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, after overhearing someone talking about the marine biology program there. Ms. Rodriguez said she had hoped to take Maite to Corpus Christi and show her the school. “We never got the opportunity to go,” she said.

Whenever Maite put her mind to something, she did it, Ms. Rodriguez said. When a friend gave her a toy sewing machine, she researched how to use it — and fix it — on YouTube. She began to make pillows for her mother, stepfather and little brother with motifs of bees, honeycombs and cowboys.

“I want the world to know she was my absolute best friend,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “We did everything together. She was charismatic, loving, ambitious, competitive, she was self-driven, focused, she was a fighter and my best friend. She was my sweet girl.”

Maite was one of the 21 people — 19 students and two teachers — who were killed by a gunman on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School. The other students were Jackie Cazares and Eliahna “Ellie” Garcia, who were 9; Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, Makenna Lee Elrod, Jose Flores, Uziyah Garcia, Amerie Jo Garza, Xavier Lopez, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, Tess Marie Mata, Alithia Haven Ramirez, Annabelle Rodriguez, Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, Layla Salazar, Jailah Silguero, Eliahana Torres and Rojelio Torres, who were 10; and Maranda Gail Mathis, 11. The teachers were Irma Garcia, 48, and Eva Mireles, 44.

‘A presence about her’

This was Makenna Lee Elrod’s first year playing softball and she reveled in it. She scored a homerun and, when a game came to an end, it took at least 20 minutes for her to give bear hugs to all her teammates and say goodbye.

“Makenna had a presence about her,” her mother, April Brown Elrod, said in a Facebook message. “You knew when she was in the room. She brought joy to all who knew her.”

Makenna made friends everywhere she went. About a month before the shooting, she posed for a photo with her friends at Robb Elementary School’s field day. Arm-in-arm, Makenna, Jailah Silguero and Maite Yuleana Rodriguez smiled for the camera. Eliahna Garcia peeked from behind. Makenna also took a selfie with her friend Tess Marie Mata. All of them died in the shooting.

Makenna played flag football and did flips in gymnastics. She loved feeding animals with her dad, and she looked forward to showing pigs, steers and chickens in a stock show with the 4-H youth club in a few years. She often wrote notes and hid them for her family to find later, and she attended her local Baptist church. She loved the religious song “The Lion and the Lamb,” belting it out in the shower and in the car.

“I’m struggling,” her mother said in mid-June. “We had so many plans, and she had a bright future. I feel like when I found out she was missing I held my breath, and I haven’t been able to catch it yet.”

Plans to become a veterinarian

Faith Mata, a 21-year-old college student, was 11 years older than her littler sister, Tess, but they were always close.

“Tess was just very joyful,” Ms. Mata remembered on Friday as she stood at the front door of their home in Uvalde, sometimes using the present tense to describe her sister, who died after a gunman stormed her fourth-grade class at Robb Elementary.

“She was sassy,” Ms Mata said. “She loves dancing. She loves get dressed up with her hair done. She’s just a ball of joy. I don’t think she ever came in contact with someone and they didn’t leave with a smile on their face.”

Tess, who had a cat named Oliver, planned to be a veterinarian, but Ms. Mata thought her younger sister was perhaps more suited to become a teacher. She said she was an stellar student who loved Tess, who had a cat named Oliver, planned to be a veterinarian, but Ms. Mata said her younger sister was perhaps more suited to become a teacher.

Tess was “an excellent student” and “loved going to school and being with her friends,” Ms. Mata said. “She loved her two teachers.”

The sisters often watched old Disney movies but much of their time together was spent on the softball field where Tess became a second-base standout under the tutelage of her older sister.

“That little girl taught herself to pitch by watching YouTube videos and would have been an amazing pitcher,” Ms. Mata said.

Mermaids and unicorns

When Maranda Gail Mathis, 11, started school, she was shy and quiet, her mother, Deanna Gornto, said. But as the year went on, she opened up and made friends.

She was a creative girl who loved music, mermaids and unicorns — encouraged by her mother and aunts. She and her younger brother were always together and loved to play Roblox on her tablet. But Maranda also loved the outdoors. She enjoyed running during school field days, swimming in the river and showing rocks she found to her mother.

“The one thing I know is she loved her whole family,” Ms. Gornto said. “She loved all of us.”

Dreams of becoming a lawyer

Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, known as Lexi, was an honor student at Robb Elementary School who loved TikTok, dreamed of being a lawyer and was “the student every teacher wants,” said her mother, Kimberly Rubio.

On Tuesday morning, Lexi, a fourth grader, had just received a good citizenship award and an honor roll award for getting all A’s. Later that day, all of her family’s joy was ripped away, Ms. Rubio said.

“We talked about women’s rights, and she was a budding feminist,” said Ms. Rubio, 33, her voice breaking at times.

Lexi’s parents said they had waited until the last moment to name her, deciding on something that would stand out when called at a high school graduation.

“She was my baby,” Ms. Rubio said. “I don’t want anybody else to go through this.”

‘The heart of our life’

Layla Salazar was an energetic girl who had just won three first-place ribbons for athletics at school and was already planning summer sleepovers with her friends at her grandparents’ house, her grandfather Vincent Salazar said.

“My granddaughter was one that loved everything about life, and they took it away from her,” Mr. Salazar said in an interview in front of his home in Uvalde on Thursday. “They took her away from us. How do you mend a broken heart from a family as close as we had?”

Relatives from across the country have come to Uvalde to be with the family as they grieve, Mr. Salazar said, filling the home after the loss of a little girl whose absence could not be felt more strongly.

“Layla, to our family, was the heart of our life.”

When asked his name by a reporter, Mr. Salazar paused.

“I was Grandpa — I was Layla Salazar’s grandpa. That was what she called me, was Grandpa.”

‘A joy and a light’

Irma Garcia, a teacher of more than two decades, was known as a steadfast optimist in her family. She would crack jokes at gatherings in Uvalde, Texas, sing her favorite classic rock tunes during parties and help her nephew, John Martinez, with homework.

“She’s always been optimistic about everything, and just so loving with the people in her life,” said Mr. Martinez, 21, a student at Texas State University.

On Tuesday, he and his family had gathered to process the news from the authorities: Ms. Garcia had been killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

When the authorities went inside the classroom moments after the shooting, Mr. Martinez said, they had “found her body there, embracing children in her arms pretty much until her last breath.”

She had treated her students as if they were her own children, he said, so it had been easy for loved ones to possibly “picture her putting her life on the line.”

Ms. Garcia — or Tia Garcia, as Mr. Martinez referred to his aunt in Spanish — was “like a second mom” to her nephews and students, he said.

“She brings a joy and a light to the room.”

Her husband of 24 years, Joe Garcia, died two days after the shooting of a heart attack. He had gone to her memorial on Thursday morning to drop off flowers, ruptured by the grief of losing the love of his life, Mr. Martinez said.

‘They just want their sister back’

Jailah Silguero, 10, was the youngest of four children, the “baby” of her family, her father said. She loved going to school and seeing her friends. Jailah had told her father, Jacob Silguero, 35, on Monday night that she wanted to stay home on Tuesday. It was uncharacteristic of her, and by morning, Mr. Silguero said, she seemed to have forgotten about it. She got dressed and went to school as usual.

“I can’t believe this happened to my daughter, my baby,” he said.

He added, “It’s always been a fear of mine to lose a kid.”

Mr. Silguero and the family were getting ready to go to a funeral home on Wednesday after having spent hours at the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center the day before waiting for information about Jailah. Officials asked the family to give a DNA sample using a swab.

“I figured after the DNA swab test, it was something bad,” he said. “About an hour later, they called to confirm that she had passed.”

Jailah’s siblings are taking it hard, Mr. Silguero said: “They just want their sister back.”

Jailah Silguero was among 21 people — 19 children and two adults — killed in the massacre on Tuesday.

Two cousins in one class

Jackie Cazares and Annabelle Rodriguez were cousins in the same classroom at Robb Elementary School. Jackie, who had her First Communion two weeks ago, was the social one, said Polly Flores, who was Jackie’s aunt and Annabelle’s great-aunt. “She was outgoing; she always had to be the center of attention,” Ms. Flores said. “She was my little diva.”

Annabelle, an honor roll student, was quieter. But she and her cousin were close, so close that Annabelle’s twin sister, who was home-schooled, “was always jealous,” Ms. Flores said. “We are a very tight family,” she said. “It’s just devastating.”

A little girl who loved her friends

Amerie Jo Garza was a friendly 10-year-old who loved Play-Doh.

Amerie Jo was “full of life, a jokester, always smiling,” her father, Alfred Garza III, said in a brief phone interview. She did not talk a lot about school but liked spending time with her friends at lunch, in the playground and during recess. “She was very social,” he said. “She talked to everybody.”

Amerie Jo’s extended family had gathered in the room when the Texas Rangers broke the horrible news late Tuesday.

The family’s loss came after losing several loved ones to Covid-19 over the past two years.

“We were finally getting a break, nobody was passing away,” Mr. Garza said. “Then this happened.”

Mr. Garza, who works at a used car dealership in Uvalde, said he was on a lunch break when Amerie Jo’s mother told him she could not get their daughter out of the school because it was on lockdown.

“I just went straight over there and found the chaos,” he said. He recalled seeing cars backing up on the streets, with parents trying to enter the school to find their children. Police cars were everywhere.

At first, he said, he did not think that anyone had been hurt. Then he heard that children had died. For hours, he awaited word about his daughter.

“I was kind of in shock,” he said, after hearing from the Texas Rangers. When he got home, he started to go through her pictures. “That’s when I kind of had the release,” he said. “I started crying and started mourning.”

‘She brought the neighborhood together’

Eva Mireles, who was in her 40s, loved teaching the children at Robb Elementary School, most recently fourth grade. Neighbors described her as a good-natured person who was usually smiling.

“She brought the neighborhood together,” said Javier Garcia, 18, who lived next door. “She loved those children.”

A cousin by marriage, Joe Costilla, 40, who lives down the block, said that outside of work Ms. Mireles liked to run marathons and was very athletic. “We were always hanging together — barbecues — she was a wonderful person,” he said, holding back tears. They had planned to get together over Memorial Day weekend.

Mr. Costilla’s mother, Esperanza, rushed to his home to console her grandchildren, ages 14 and 10, who knew her well.

“They are taking it really hard,” she said. “She was the kind of teacher everybody loved.”

Audrey Garcia, 48, the mother of a daughter with Down syndrome named Gabby, recalled Ms. Mireles as a transformational teacher in her child’s life.

Gabby is 23 now, with a high school diploma under her belt. Ms. Mireles had been her third-grade teacher. It was only a couple of years earlier, Ms. Garcia said, that schools in the Uvalde area had begun integrating children with mental disabilities into regular classrooms.

“It was new for teachers in that area,” Ms. Garcia said. Ms. Mireles, she said, threw herself into the work. “She used every teaching method she knew to help Gabby reach her highest potential,” she said. “She never saw that potential as lower than anyone else’s in her classroom.”

‘Tough guy’

Jose Flores, 10, had a pink T-shirt that said: “Tough guys wear pink.” His grandfather George Rodriguez called him “my little Josesito” and kept a photograph of the boy in his wallet.

Mr. Rodriguez, who also lost a niece in Tuesday’s shooting, attended counseling at the civic center in Uvalde but said it had offered him little reprieve from the pain. “They were beautiful, innocent children,” he said.

On the honor roll

Xavier Lopez, 10, made the honor roll on the day he was killed. He was eager to come home and share the news with his three brothers, but his grandparents said Xavier decided to stay at school to watch a movie and eat popcorn with his classmates.

They remembered Xavier as an exuberant baseball and soccer player who had a girlfriend at school with whom he chatted away on the phone.

Leonard Sandoval, 54, Xavier’s grandfather, stood outside the family’s home on Wednesday trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. “Why?” he asked. “Why him? Why the kids?”

‘He loved to make you laugh’

Nikki and Brett Cross said their nephew, Uziyah Garcia, 10, had moved to Uvalde to live with them just in time for the start of the school year. He loved playing basketball, soccer, the virtual-reality game Gorilla Tag and Fortnite. His favorite after-school snack was a Nutella sandwich with blue Takis, which he would try to convince others to try.

“He was goofy, he loved to make you laugh,” Ms. Cross said. “He loved making everybody laugh.”

Uziyah, or Uzi for short, would have liked to be a professional gamer or YouTuber. But he also expressed an interest in becoming a police officer, because he wanted to help people.

He was thrilled that he had a male teacher at Robb, Arnulfo Reyes, and he talked about him all the time, they said. Days after the shooting, they got his possessions back from the classroom. His math notebook had been grazed by a bullet. Tucked among his things was a portrait he had drawn of Mr. Reyes, who was badly injured in the attack.

Uzi’s favorite color was red, and Ms. Cross keeps seeing red cardinals on her lawn. She sees them as a sign that his energy is giving her the strength to go on.

‘A doll’

Eliahna “Ellie” Garcia was just a few days shy of turning 10, her father, Steven Garcia, said in a brief phone interview.

He had been looking forward to being the D.J. at Ellie’s birthday party this summer, he said in a Facebook post, adding that she had been “a doll and was the happiest ever.”

Two days after his daughter was killed, Mr. Garcia said he was “too deep in grief” to share his memories of her but wanted to thank people for their prayers.

“We miss her,” he said.

In his Facebook post, he wrote to Ellie: “Please try and stay by our side, amor.”

A budding softball player

Eliahana Torres, 10, was determined to get a hit in softball.

She was proud to be on the team for the first time, but wanted to stop striking out. So her grandfather hung a ball outside the family home, and Eliahana would work on her swing after practice, over and over. “One more,” she would say, as her family told her to come in for bed. “One more.”

Her family said she was a steadfast, incandescent presence in the home she shared with her grandparents, mother and aunt. She loved to scare her aunt, Laura Cabrales, by springing out from behind a door and shouting “Boo!” She danced around in front of her phone and belted out Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.”

“She was my love,” her grandfather, Victor M. Cabrales, said. “She was one of a kind.”

After Mr. Cabrales had heart surgery a few years ago, Eliahana accompanied him on his doctor-prescribed walks, helping him to scoop up pecans that fell from the trees shading their neighborhood near Robb Elementary School. She made sure her grandparents took their medications. On hot days, she poured a glass of ice water to be waiting for her grandfather when he came home from work. The family jokingly called her “enfermerita,” the little nurse.

She loved her cat and goldfish and cherished a trip to the lone Starbucks in Uvalde. As summer approached, her aunt, Ms. Cabrales, said that Eliahana told them she would probably cry on the last day of school because she would miss her friends so much.

A helpful brother

Euodulia Orta, 30, confirmed that her nephew Rojelio Torres, 10, died in the shooting.

“We’re still trying to cope with it,” she said. “We don’t know what to do.”

Her nephew was the second-oldest of four children, and he always helped out his siblings, she said.

“He was a loving person,” she added. “He loved his siblings.”

Reporting was contributed by Karen Zraick, David Montgomery, Richard Fausset, Jack Healy, Eduardo Medina, Christina Morales, Josh Peck, Campbell Robertson, Edgar Sandoval, Alex Traub and John Yoon.

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In a hospital waiting room, a pastor consoles grieving grandparents.

Never in his 30 years of service had Pastor Jimenez dealt with such a tragedy. He shook his head in disbelief at the death toll, mostly children, in this close-knit community in South Texas.

“Sometimes it’s about the presence and the prayers. In times like these all you can do is cry,” he said.

Before noon, the first calls started to come in that something was wrong, Pastor Jimenez recalled. At first it seemed as if the danger had passed. An armed man had stumbled upon a school and initial reports said he had been arrested.

But it did not take long for the harrowing nature of the events to reach him. When he got to the hospital, he saw many grieving relatives hugging each other and sitting somberly.

He did not want to identify the grandparents because the authorities had not released the victims’ name Tuesday night.

“They had to endure the most difficult thing, they could not find their grandson,” he said in a hushed tone. “And then when they found it, it was devastating.”

After offering comfort, he was on his way to buy pizza for the boy’s four surviving siblings.

“This has impacted us,” he said, disappearing into the dark parking lot. “We come to let them know how much we care and how much we love them and offer support any way they can. We are at a loss. It is hard sometimes to see God through all of this.”

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Witnesses describe the fear that grips a community.

Mr. Verdusco, who has a 9-year-old fourth grader at the school, headed back to work but around 1:40 p.m. told his employer he was leaving to pick up his son. His wife’s aunt was shot, he said, adding that she was “OK” and undergoing surgery at a hospital in San Antonio.

On a street behind the gunman’s grandmother’s home, Elisha Mata was at home with her parents and younger brother when, she said, she heard gunshots. From the front door, they saw a car pass by. The driver was “shooting at the vehicle behind him,” Ms. Mata said. (The police have not released a detailed account of events before the shooting at the school. The gunman’s grandmother had been shot in her home, they said.)

Ms. Mata’s nephew was in the school cafeteria when the shooting happened, she said, and had recounted how staff turned off the lights and instructed everyone to be quiet. A janitor rushed to lock the doors, and students eventually escaped through a side exit, she said, where they hid in a backyard. Her nephew returned home safely around 2 p.m., she said.

News of the shooting spread quickly across the small town of Uvalde and beyond.

Evan Herrera, who was talking to his neighbor Mr. Verdusco across a fence, said he had been about 80 miles away in San Antonio most of the day and had received an alert about the shooting. It said, “‘There’s a shooter; he’s barricaded in the school,’ and that was it,” Mr. Herrera said.

On Tuesday evening at a prayer service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Uvalde, Marisa Salinas put her arm around Mireyah Chavez, 10, a student at Robb Elementary School who was present during the shooting.

Some residents shared their fears for family members inside the building on Tuesday. Adolfo Hernandez, a longtime resident of Uvalde, said he began calling his sister-in-law when he heard about the shooting. His nephew is a student at the school and was in a classroom across the hall from where the gunman began firing, he said.

“My nephew got out with scrapes and cuts,” Mr. Hernandez said, but saw a friend get shot. “My nephew was devastated.”

Rey Chapa of Uvalde has a nephew who was at the school during the shooting but was not injured.

“This is just evil,” Mr. Chapa said in a phone interview, using an expletive. He was waiting to hear back from family and friends about the conditions of other children and scrolling through Facebook for updates. “I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.”

Reporting was contributed by Christopher Lee Josh Peck, Alyssa Lukpat and Eduardo Medina.

Biden’s speech echoes decades of presidential addresses following mass school shootings.

Mr. Biden said he spent his return trip to the White House, where he delivered the seven-minute speech, wondering why “these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world.” He asked: “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

President Donald J. Trump

In 2018, after a 19-year-old opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, killing 17 people, Mr. Trump said:

“No child, no teacher, should ever be in danger in an American school. No parent should ever have to fear for their sons and daughters when they kiss them goodbye in the morning.”

“We must also work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life, that creates deep and meaningful human connections and that turns classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors.”

“We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools, and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”

President Barack Obama

In 2012, after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Mr. Obama said:

“The majority of those who died today were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. Among the fallen were also teachers — men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.”

“As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

President George W. Bush

In 2007 after two attacks on the campus of Virginia Tech left 32 people dead, Mr. Bush said:

“I told them that my administration would do everything possible to assist with the investigation, and that I pledged that we would stand ready to help local law enforcement and the local community in any way we can during this time of sorrow.”

“Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and learning. When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.”

President Bill Clinton

In 1999, after the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., when two 12th-grade students at the school murdered 12 classmates and a teacher, Mr. Clinton said:

“I think that Patricia Holloway would not mind if I said that, amidst all the turmoil and grief that she and others are experiencing, she said to me just a moment ago that perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge if it could happen in a place like Littleton, and we could prevent anything like this from happening again. We pray that she is right.”

“We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons. And we do know we have to do more to recognize the early warning signs that are sent before children act violently.”

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Arming teachers? The debate resurfaces with the Uvalde shooting.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said on CNN that restricting gun rights is ineffective in stopping shootings; instead, Mr. Cruz pushed for more law enforcement on campuses. “We know from past experience one of the most effective tools for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.”

After delivering an impassioned and anguished plea to his colleagues calling for stricter gun control measures, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, objected against the idea of armed staff on sites like school grounds. Mr. Murphy was a young representative during the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn. in 2012.

Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota, railed against the idea of more weaponry on campus. “I’m a gun owner,” Mr. Phillips wrote on Twitter. “Do not tell me our Founders conceived of this carnage when they wrote the Constitution. Do not tell me they would have tolerated this madness. Do not tell me that teachers must be armed. And do not tell me your AR15 is worth more than another 14 children’s lives.”

Within hours of the shooting, Democrats moved to clear the way to force votes that would strengthen background checks for gun purchasers.

The debate on training and arming educators, guards and others is a lightning rod in addressing school safety. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Wayne LaPierre, a top official at the National Rifle Association, said after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Most law enforcement experts argue that teachers should not carry guns because they lack the tactical knowledge to handle them.

That idea resurfaced in 2018, after a former student killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. State lawmakers passed legislation to restrict gun rights, but also lifted a ban on arming classroom teachers despite vocal objections from gun control advocates. Teachers are allowed to carry guns through a program that was created in the wake of the shooting.

The nation’s largest teachers groups have argued against arming their ranks.

In 2018, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that the response from 60,000 teachers after the Parkland shooting was “universal, even from educators who are gun owners: Teachers don’t want to be armed, we want to teach,” Ms. Weingarten said. “We don’t want to be, and would never have the expertise needed to be, sharpshooters; no amount of training can prepare an armed teacher to go up against an AR-15.”

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An F.B.I. report shows a steep rise in ‘active’ shooters.

The 2021 total represented a 52 percent increase from the tally of such shootings in 2020, and a 97 percent increase from 2017, according to the F.B.I.’s Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021 report.

The report classifies an “active” shooting incident as one in which “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.”

The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks shootings around the country, defines a “mass shooting” as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, without differentiating between people who attack strangers or people they know, or the setting of the crime.

The archive has counted at least 215 such shootings through mid-May. Of those shootings, 10 involved four or more fatalities. The group recorded 693 mass shootings last year, with 28 involving four or more fatalities.

The deadliest mass shooting last year occurred at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., where 10 people were killed, according to the F.B.I.

The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has already surpassed that, with at least 18 reported dead; Earlier last month, a white supremacist stalked and killed 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo.

The F.B.I. report identified one particularly chilling trend among active shooters: Officials have noticed an increase in the number who moved from place to place in search of victims, a group the bureau refers to as “roving” shooters.

More than two dozen shootings in 2021, including eight murders at an Atlanta spa, fit that category.

Among the report’s other main findings:

• All but one of the 61 active shootings last year were carried out by men, ranging in age from 12 to 67; two wore body armor; 30 shooters were apprehended by law enforcement, 14 shooters were killed by law enforcement, four were killed by armed citizens, 11 shooters committed suicide, and one remains at large.

• The report is part of a series of FBI active shooter-related “products” first published in 2014, intended to provide insight for first responders, policymakers and law enforcement officers.

• The guns used in mass shootings are usually, for the most part, purchased legally — although many are later illegally modified to increase their firing rates and bullet capacities.

• From 1966 to 2019, 77 percent of mass shooters obtained the weapons they used in their crimes through legal purchases, according to a comprehensive survey of law enforcement data, academic papers and news accounts compiled by the National Institute of Justice, the research wing of the Justice Department, and released earlier this year.

‘It’s almost like an instant replay.’ Newtown parents grapple with another school shooting.

Nearly a decade later, while watching the death toll rise after Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., one father of a Sandy Hook victim felt defeated.

“I guess it’s something in society we know will happen again, over and over,” said Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse Lewis, 6, died in the shooting in 2012.

Mr. Heslin said he “felt compelled” to watch the coverage. “It’s almost like an instant replay of Sandy Hook,” he said.

That replay, he predicted, would include a revived debate over gun legislation, and while that occurs after most high-profile mass shootings, it grows more heated after massacres at schools.

Scores of mass shootings have occurred since Sandy Hook, including the 2018 shooting that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and the shooting the same year that killed 10 at Santa Fe High School in Texas. There have been so many school shootings, in fact, that some of the Sandy Hook families say they can predict the nation’s reaction, which Veronique De La Rosa, mother of Noah Pozner, the youngest child to die in Newtown, described on Tuesday as “unfortunately, a state of paralysis.”

Because they involve children, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe and now Uvalde stoke anguished debate over gun policy and new legislation. Even in Texas, a state with some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation, mass shootings have spurred support for a reckoning.

The National Rifle Association, whose political and financial heft helped ensure the defeat of a package of gun legislation after Sandy Hook, is now a weakened organization. But the political forces that doomed even relatively modest legislation tightening background checks and banning high-capacity gun magazines still hold sway. Asked for his prediction on what the nation can expect after Uvalde, Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died in the Sandy Hook shooting, described it as “bleak.” “I can’t help but think this will follow the exact same pattern as everything else,” Mr. Parker said.

And yet the families point to bright spots for them. After Parkland, students who survived the shooting built an angry, durable movement. Groups like Moms Demand Action, founded after Sandy Hook, have made strides at the state and local level. The Sandy Hook families have won a half dozen defamation lawsuits against conspiracy theorists, as misinformation campaigns around mass shootings and attacks on survivors have become part of the pushback against new gun legislation.

Earlier this year, the Sandy Hook relatives won a record $73 million settlement from insurers for Remington, maker of the AR-15 rifle used in the shooting. The Remington victory, which inspired several similar lawsuits against gun manufacturers, strikes at a 2005 law that shields gun makers from liability after mass shootings, an N.R.A.-backed measure that Ms. De La Rosa calls “a gross injustice.”

“This is a public safety epidemic,” Ms. De La Rosa said Tuesday. “Our priorities are so skewed as a society. Yet there are ways to right the ship.”

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Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers.

But some Democrats said they saw hope for bipartisan consensus on proposals that polls show have overwhelming support among Americans. And in any case, many were clamoring to force Republicans to go on the record on the measures at a time when grief and anger about gun violence in America has erupted anew following Tuesday’s massacre and a recent mass shooting that killed 10 at a Buffalo supermarket.

“What are we doing?” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, asked in an emotional speech on the Senate floor. “Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate? Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority, if your answer is that as the slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”

Mr. Murphy, who began pushing for gun safety and background check legislation after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., said after his speech that he believed there were 10 Republican votes to strike a deal that could move through the 50-50 Senate, where 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster.

But it was not clear whether that was the case, or how quickly Democrats planned to move.

“I’m outraged, I’m hurt, and I believe that this could be our undoing, if we can’t protect our children,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey.

Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures.

Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, said “it’s one thing to say that, regardless of the facts, you should just do something. The question is whether something you would do would actually make a difference.”

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, blamed Democrats “and a whole lot of folks in the media” for rushing to “try to restrict the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens.”

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a centrist Democrat who has unsuccessfully tried to win enough support for legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers, lamented the polarization in Congress that stymied his efforts and others.

“It makes no sense why we can’t do common sense things to try to prevent some of this from happening,” Mr. Manchin said. “It’s just unbelievable how we got here as a society.”

But he stopped short of supporting what could be the only path to doing so, telling reporters he maintained his opposition to doing away with the filibuster to get around Republican opposition and pass such legislation with only Democratic votes.

“You would think there’d be enough common sense,” Mr. Manchin said. “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity.”

‘I am sick and tired of it. We have to act,’ Biden says.

Mr. Biden spoke for just seven minutes, giving voice to the grief and anger and frustration of many Americans, asking: “Why? Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”

The president took direct aim at gun manufacturers and their representatives in Washington, urging politicians to stand up to the power they wield. But he made no specific gun control proposals nor called on Congress to vote immediately on legislation.

“The gun manufacturers have spent two decades aggressively marketing assault weapons, which make them the most and largest profit,” Mr. Biden said. “For God’s sake, we have to have the courage to stand up to the industry.”

He added: “Where in God’s name is our backbone?”

The president delivered his remarks from the Roosevelt Room of the White House less than two hours after returning from a five-day trip to South Korea and Japan. Noting his return home, Mr. Biden said no other country had the same kind of problem with mass shootings.

But while Mr. Biden expressed horror and outrage at the shooting, he steered clear of using the moment to wade directly into the gun control debate, which has been one of the country’s most polarizing issues for more than a decade.

Mr. Biden was in the White House, as vice president, in December of 2012, when 20 young children were killed at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. He spent more than a month developing a list of gun control proposals, only to see most of them flame out in the Senate three months later.

In the years since, he has decried mass shootings again and again: at schools, churches, restaurants, nightclubs, workplaces and more. In his remarks Tuesday night, Mr. Biden repeatedly appeared to choke back tears as he was called to do it again.

“My fellow Americans,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’d hoped when I became President, I would not have to do this. Again.”

“Another massacre. Uvalde, Texas. An elementary school,” he said. “Beautiful, innocent, second, third, fourth graders. And how many scores of little children who witness what happened, see their friends die as if they’re on a battlefield for God’s sake.”

Speaking from personal experience, he added: “To lose a child. It’s like having a piece of your soul ripped away.” He did not mention the loss of his son Beau from cancer or the death of his first wife and young daughter in a car crash.

But he made it clear that he understands — and grieves — for the parents of the children who were killed on Tuesday.

“The hollowness in your chest,” he said. “You feel like you’re being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out.”