An 11-year-old girl escaped the Texas school shooting by putting the blood of a killed classmate all over herself and pretending to be dead.
After Salvador Ramos rushed into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday and murdered 19 of her students as well as two instructors, Miah Cerrillo followed the survival strategy.
According to the Washington Post, the small child arrived late to school on Tuesday following a doctor’s visit, and an hour later she was attempting to survive an active shooter.
After her friend was shot, Miah laid on top of the girl – who, at the time, was still breathing – to pretend they were both dead.
She used the blood of an unidentified female friend to make herself look wounded. That friend later succumbed to her wounds and died, her dad Miguel Cerillo confirmed.
‘Miah got some blood and put it on herself to pretend that she was dead,’ her aunt Blanca Rivera told Click 2 Houston. ‘My sister-in-law said is that [Miah] saw her friend full of blood, and she got blood and put it on herself.’
While Miah survived the atrocity, she was left with bullet fragments the way down her back and neck, and is now deeply traumatized by the horrific bloodbath that she witnessed.
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Despite surviving the horrific event, the fourth-grader sustained mild injuries.
‘My brother said she had bullet fragments in her back,’ Rivera said. Cerrillo was taken to the hospital for treatment and has since been released, Click 2 Houston reported.
After being released from the hospital, Cerrillo was reportedly doing fine until around midnight, when the aftermath and trauma finally hit her, her family said.
Her mother called Rivera to tell her that Cerrillo was crying and it had just ‘hit her.’
‘I think it just hit Miah. I think everything came to reality. We’re home, and she’s just crying and having a panic attack,’ the girl’s mother told Rivera, according to Click 2 Houston.
She reportedly told her father to get his gun because ‘[Ramos was] going to come get us,’ the Washington Post reported.
The family said they will be working to help Cerrillo emotionally and mentally, as well as her sister – who is a second-grader at the school – following the shooting.
‘At this point, we just have to pray and ask God to help us move forward through this situation. I know it’s traumatizing and having an 11-year-old go through this, I can’t imagine what she’s feeling,’ Rivera told Click 2 Houston.
The shooting rampage began at 11am when Ramos shot his grandmother.
At 11.15am, he sent a message to a girl in Germany telling her he was on his way to ‘shoot an elementary school.’ He crashed his truck at 11.30am and made his way to the school with one AR-15 rifle. At 11.32am, he bypassed at least one cop at the school entrance.
He got inside, barricaded himself in a classroom and managed to stay there for up to an hour – terrorizing kids – before he was finally gunned down.=
The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest since 20 elementary-age children and six staff were killed at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.
A Texas law enforcement official said Thursday that the Uvalde shooter entered the elementary school building ‘unobstructed’ through a door that was apparently unlocked.
Victor Escalon, a regional director at the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the gunman did not initially encounter any law enforcement officers when he entered Robb Elementary School on Tuesday and opened fire.
Law enforcement authorities faced mounting questions and criticism Thursday over how much time elapsed before they stormed a Texas elementary school classroom and put a stop to the rampage.
Many other details about the timing of events and the police response remained murky.
The motive for the massacre remained under investigation, with authorities saying Ramos had no known criminal or mental health history.
The gunman shot his own grandmother in the face minutes before attacking the school, and his text messages indicated that he was in an argument with the 66-year-old grandma about his phone bill.
In addition to mourning the loss of the 19 students and two teachers, the Uvalde community is trying to cope with the tragedy.
Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex who now lives in California, has paid tribute to the victims of a school shooting in Texas by visiting a memorial near the site of the massacre.
Markle was photographed on Thursday laying a bouquet of white roses at a makeshift memorial outside the Uvalde County Courthouse, not far from the scene of the senseless slayings at Robb Elementary School.
She also stopped by an Uvalde community center that is hosting a blood drive, where she toured the facility and donated food, a volunteer there told DailyMail.com. ‘She did not want anybody to know who she was,’ the person said.
The duchess took the trip in a personal capacity as a mother, to offer her condolences and support in person to a community experiencing unimaginable grief, her spokesperson told People.