“I was scared and stressed, because the bullets almost hit me.
Daniel, a student of elementary school student Robb in Uvalde, confides in the Washington Post.
Like him, many survivors of the massacre, during which 19 of their comrades and two teachers lost their lives, are beginning to testify.
Their accounts of the hour spent locked up with the shooter, Salvador Ramos, before the police intervened are chilling.
Upon entering the room, the latter had closed the door, telling the children: “you are all going to die”, before opening fire, said a survivor, Samuel Salinas, 10, told the ABC channel on Friday.
"I think he was aiming at me," testified the child, but a chair between him and the shooter blocked the bullet.
In the room on the floor covered in blood, Samuel Salinas, in order not to be targeted by the shots, tried to "play dead".
“Traumatized” children, who no longer want to return to school
Miah Cerrillo, 11, tried to escape the attention of Salvador Ramos in the same way.
The girl covered herself in the blood of a comrade, whose corpse was next to her, she explained to CNN, in unfilmed testimony.
She had just seen the teenager kill his teacher, after saying "good night" to her.
A child, also hit by a bullet, had gently asked her teacher to call the police, saying that she "bleeded a lot", related Daniel, who can no longer sleep alone and has nightmares.
His teacher, who was injured in the attack but survived, whispered to the students to "stay calm" and "stay still".
The children who survived “are traumatized, and they will have to live with that all their lives,” said his mother, Briana Ruiz.
Samuel Salinas also said he had nightmares, in which he saw the shooter.
The idea of going back to school, or even seeing your classmates again, is still frightening.
"I'm not looking forward," he said, adding that he wanted to "stay at home" and "rest".
Failure of the regulation on firearms
On the eve of Joe Biden's visit, these testimonies only accentuated the controversy around the reaction of the police.
Pressed by reporters to explain their much-criticized response time, Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Friday that law enforcement believed "there may be no no more survivors.
However, the police received numerous calls from several people in the two affected classrooms, including one from a child at 12:16 p.m., more than half an hour before the police intervention at 12:50 p.m., warning that " eight to nine students were alive,” Steven McCraw said.
The shooting, described as "new Sandy Hook" in the American press, in reference to the appalling massacre in a Connecticut elementary school in 2012, has awakened the traumas of America.
The faces of the very young victims, aged 9 to 11, broadcast repeatedly on television, and the testimonies of their collapsed relatives have moved the country, relaunching a wave of calls for better regulation of firearms.
But Joe Biden, who has regularly denounced the “epidemic” of gun violence, has so far failed to pass major gun control legislation.
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