Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from Uvalde’s Darkest Hour (Texas A&M University Press, December 3) by Craig Garnett, who has owned the Uvalde Leader-News, the local newspaper, since 1989.
Eleven-year-old girls, especially close friends sharing feelings, don’t search for words as much as words find them. The sounds that tumble from their lips coalesce into sentences a nanosecond ahead of their brains’ ability to complete the narrative. That is why they finish each others’ sentences or pounce on the last syllable as a springboard to a new, entirely unrelated topic—princesses of non sequitur.
These are the conversations Khloie Torres, Kendall Olivarez, Miah Cerillo, Leann Garcia, and Rakenzie Muñoz immersed themselves in when they carved out valuable time together. The friends dished about the usual stuff: the latest craziness on TikTok, games they were playing, their sports ambitions, classmates, teachers, and boys—if they were at all interesting. And one other topic, a more haunting and dominating subject: how to cope as a survivor of a mass shooting.
Khloie, Miah, and Kendall had watched a haunted 18-year-old turn two classrooms full of joyful souls into an abattoir of torn, bleeding, terrified victims. One hundred and fifty seconds. That’s how long it took the killer to destroy so much that was beautiful. He used the remaining seventy-four and one-half minutes of his time as a sentient being to torment, torture, and continue to kill.
Rakenzie had been spared the trauma of being wounded or watching others die, but she was there that day—cowering with her teacher Mercedes Salas directly across from the killing—hearing the sounds and sharing the smell of fear and gore.
Khloie’s dad, Ruben Torres, above all others, understood what the surviving girls and boys had endured. He called it “their firefight,” a reality the veteran had lived as a .50-caliber machine gunner on a Humvee during tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. “They were in the shit … in the shit, but the biggest difference is they didn’t have anything to protect themselves with.”
Almost nine years in the Marine Corps—especially eight months in Al Ramadi, Iraq, in 2005—had changed Torres. Frequent firefights with insurgents and the neverending threat of improvised exploding devices (IEDs) ensured that he never stopped surveilling—scanning motorists, shopkeepers, and even public officials as potential attackers. Every vehicle that drove parallel to their convoy was a potential target. If a driver came too close, the marines followed strict rules of engagement. The interloper first received a warning shot from an M-16 or a “popped” flare to get his attention. If those measures failed, the Americans opened fire with their .50-caliber machine guns and even more powerful weapons.
Ruben acknowledged that when he returned stateside it was not easy for his kids to live with his hypervigilance. “Every time they went with me it was a fucking mission,” he said of his family, which in addition to his daughter included his wife, Jamie, and two teenage sons. “It’s a mindset and you just don’t get rid of it.”
There was a certain way to leave the house and enter the family vehicle. You memorized cars in the neighborhood, which families they belonged to, and what did not fit in. And in malls, restaurants, and other public places, Ruben scanned for anything that did not feel right. He talked with his children about previous mass shootings and survival techniques that included isolating the source of the gunshots and then—if you were mobile—moving away from the shooter or remaining still, as though you were dead.
At the end of the day, Ruben’s experience as a combat soldier saved lives in Room 112. It was Khloie who called 911 four times to beg officers to intervene. And while her efforts failed to elicit an immediate response, one could argue that without those calls, officers might have waited even longer to rescue the wounded. But for sure it was Khloie’s cool head in the classroom, whispering for her classmates to be quiet while the killer lingered in the adjoining room and suggesting that students like Miah smear blood on herself to appear dead, that helped preserve life. A former marine deserves credit for having implanted that blueprint for survival.
