A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, MAY 26 , 2022
Texas school shootingInside, they waited with other
families for any news, but noth-
ing came for hours. They sat at
large tables, where pizza and
bottled water were offered.
“A lot of the families were noteating,” Faith said. “It was all
families of students who were
not accounted for.”
Many of the families huddled
together, she said. Hardly any of
the families mingled with others.As day turned into night, girl’s family learned of her death
the same thing. A gunman was at
Robb Elementary.
“But we thought it was under
control,” Faith said. Soon, her
father, Jerry Mata, an aviation
mechanic, drove to Robb El-
ementary. He and Faith spoke,
and that’s when the elder daugh-
ter realized the gravity of the
situation. “My dad showed up
and when he got to Robb, he said
it looked like a scene from a
movie with all the cops there,”
she said. “So I waited for the
all-clear.”
But the all-clear didn’t come.
“I started getting gossip. An-
other cousin wrote me and said
she thought the shooter locked
himself in a classroom,” Faith
said. “Now I was kind of freaking
out.”
Faith, who was supposed to
report to work at an after-school
day care, called her bosses and
took the day off. A roommate,
also from Uvalde, drove Faith the
two-plus hours west to get home.
On the interstate, Faith said she
was constantly calling her moth-
er, who had gone to the civic
center and was waiting for
school buses carrying evacuated
students. She told her mother
the same thing over and over.
“‘You need to let me know
when they find Tess. Call me as
soon as you get her,’ ” Faith
recalled. “But they never called
me back. That’s when I knew
something was off.”
Meanwhile, Faith was calling
area hospitals. One in Uvalde.
Another in San Antonio. But
none of them had Tess.
“Where was she?” Faith re-
membered thinking. “My hope
was that she was lost or hiding
somewhere in the school.”
On Facebook, she tapped out a
frantic post: “Facebook friends
please help my family! We are
looking for my sister Tess Marie
Mata. She was at Robb Elemen-
tary. If y’all have any information
you can give me please let me
know!”
When Faith arrived in Uvalde
in the late afternoon, her friend
dropped her off at the civic
center. Her dad met her out front
and escorted her to a room.
TESS FROM A1 “Everyone was on their own,”
Faith recalled. “I felt guilty if I
were to eat. I didn’t know where
my sister was. If she wasn’t
eating, why would I get to eat? A
lot of the people were on the
phone or with their heads down.
The room was silent most of the
time.”
Late in the evening, she said,
officials came by and started
taking DNA swabs of parents.
They were swabbing their
cheeks, she said. The Matas, like
other families, also had supplied
authorities with a photo of Tess.
“When they asked for the DNA
swabs, it was the way they
phrased it — they needed them
to help identify or find a child,”
Faith recalled. “I just had a bad
feeling.”
At some point deeper into the
night, Texas law enforcement
officials took Tess’s mother and
father into a private room at the
civic center. A Texas Ranger
broke the news, Veronica said.
“He just told us that Tess was
one of the deceased,” Veronica
recalled. “My husband and I, we
embraced. Then I asked for them
to bring in Faith.” Tess — known
by many as Tessy — was one of
the 19 children and two teachers
killed that day at Robb Elemen-
tary.
When the door opened, Faith
saw her mother’s face.
“Her eyes were glossy. She just
looked at me like our lives were
about to change,” Faith recalled.
Inside the room, Faith sat
down and broke down. But then
she held it all back and ad-
dressed the two Texas Rangers.
“They said the suspect was
dead and that they killed him.
And that if we needed any coun-
seling, they’d be here for the rest
of the week,” Faith recalled. “At
that point, we were just sad
about my sister, but at the same
time, we did want to know what
happened to the gunman.”
They left the building through
a back door to avoid the news
crews. But instead of going
home, they drove to Jerry’s par-
ents’ home. Tess’s and Faith’s
grandparents. Tess was close to
them because they drove her to
school every day and her grand-
mother always picked her up.
When the Matas arrived, all
Faith remembers hearing at first
were the screams. She entered
her grandparents’ home, where
her grandfather, so distraught,
fetched a photo of Tess that had
been sitting on the mantel.
“He was just holding it. Cry-
ing,” Faith said. “She was wear-
ing a purple shirt and jeans in
that photo.”
The three of them went home.
The first thing they did was enter
Tess’s bedroom. Inside, they saw
the narrative of her life: The
purple walls. The corkboard with
photos of her standing next to
the Easter Bunny or being held
in Faith’s arms. “I Love You
Faith!!!!” she scrawled on the
bottom border of the corkboard.
On another wall was a poster of
Houston Astros second baseman
José Altuve, her favorite player,
so beloved that she, too, played
second base on her softball team.
A soccer medal hung from the
ceiling, dangling next to a soccer
trophy and a container full of
dollar bills.
“My sister was saving that
money for a family trip,” Faith
recalled. “She wanted us all to go
to Disney World. She went a
couple years ago. But she loved it
so much she wanted to go back.
We were planning to go once I
graduated from college next
year.”
Over by her desk sat a framed
photo of the sisters having lunch
in San Antonio, next to a glass
full of pencils and markers and a
miniature toy giraffe. A calendar
from February hangs on the wall.
“B-Day” is scrawled on Feb. 6.
It was time to go sleep. Faith
had an idea. She wanted to sleep
in the same bed as her parents.
She was 21. But she felt the need.
Then, another idea. They
grabbed Tess’s white pillows,
each of them printed with but-
terflies and flowers, and they
took her pink blanket with pan-
das all over it. They took every-
thing and put it all on Veronica
and Jerry’s bed. Now it was time
to try to fall asleep. All three of
them together.
“My mom slept with Tess’s
blanket. We all each got one of
her pillows,” Faith said. “It
smelled like Tess.”COURTESY OF THE MATA FAMILY
Tess Mata at a restaurant in
San Marcos, Tex., in December.
The fourth-grader had been
saving for a family trip to
Disney World, her sister said.conservative lawmakers defied
the gun lobbyists who for dec-
ades have opposed even widely
popular reforms.
It was a frustration that no one
expressed more clearly on Tues-
day than Fred Guttenberg, an-
other Parkland parent, whose
daughter, Jaime, was killed four
years ago. In an interview on
MSNBC, he couldn’t contain his
fury toward the politicians who
refused to support change.
“I’d like to tell them all to go
f-off because of what they did,
what they do. The way they
politicize guns and violence led
us to this day,” he said, before
turning to the victims.
“Parents, loved ones, who
their world is spinning. Who
right now have to think, ‘How am
I going to plan a funeral?’ Who
right now have to think, ‘What
kind of casket?’ Who right now
have to think, ‘All I did was send
them to school. And I have to
plan their funeral. And I have towrite a eulogy. I have to comfort
those who I love. My other chil-
dren, my spouse, my friends, my
neighbors. I have to figure out
how to go forward.’
“Because people failed,” he
continued. “They ... f---ing failed
our kids again, okay? I’m done.
I’ve had it. You know, how many
more times?”
How many more times is a
question that has been repeated
by millions of people after hun-
dreds of shootings, and Gutten-
berg and Hockley and Oliver and
Wind all knew that Tuesday did
not mark the last day it would be
asked.
The shootings will continue,
and with them, more tears, more
nausea, more pain. And though
they understand that change
might never come, all of them say
they’ll keep fighting for it, be-
cause of another question
they’ve repeated over and over:
What other choice do they
have?other to their favorite music —
Frank Ocean and Tupac from
Joaquin, the Ramones and the
Clash from Oliver.
But the good memories were
fleeting, because father and son
would never make new ones.
Joaquin was gone. That was the
life sentence Uvalde’s parents
would now begin to serve.
“I’m not happy with life any-
more,” Oliver said. “I just live.”
Wind, the 21-year-old Park-
land survivor, hasn’t given up
being happy, but he also under-
stands how gun violence could
haunt anyone — including him —
forever, especially in a countrywhere the threat of another mass
shooting never subsides.
It struck him as he sat on the
bus, checking for updates on his
phone, that the kids at Robb
were part of an entirely different
generation from the teens at
Parkland. But here they were,
linked by the most American
crisis of all.
“There are no words,” he said,
pausing, “except the same words
as the time before that and the
time before that and the time
before that.”
Like the others, and like Presi-
dent Biden, Wind believed that
progress wouldn’t happen until“This didn’t hit close to home. This is home.”
Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Connecticut i n 2012, on her reaction to Tuesday’s massacre
at Robb Elementary School in TexasBY JOHN WOODROW COXNicole Hockley learned about
Tuesday’s massacre during a
meeting at the organization she
co-founded nearly a decade ago
after her 6-year-old son was shot
and killed at Sandy Hook El-
ementary. Manuel Oliver learned
about it while he was in his home
office, planning what he would
do next to bring more attention
to his 17-year-old son, who was
shot dead at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School. Alex Wind
learned about it on a bus trip to
New York, where he was headed
to attend a wedding and take a
break from the daily fight for gun
reform he’s sought since he hid
in a Parkland, Fla., classroom
closet, listening to the gunshots
that ended 17 lives.
The tears and nausea and
breath-stripping pain would
come for all of them in the hours
ahead, but for Hockley, the
numbness arrived first.
“How are you doing?” asked
her Sandy Hook Promise co-
founder, Mark Barden, whose
7-year-old son was also killed in
the Connecticut shooting.
“I just feel empty,” Hockley
told him.
She had endured what so
many families in Uvalde, Tex.,
were about to face. By day’s end,
at least 19 children and two
adults would be reported dead at
Robb Elementary — a school of
just under 500 students, about
the same size as Sandy Hook
Elementary. The news both con-
sumed and overwhelmed the le-
gions of parents, siblings and
survivors who have devoted their
lives to stopping a day like
Tuesday from ever happening
again. Some of them turned off
their TVs and put their phones
away, unable to bear even incre-
mental updates, much less inter-
views with reporters. Others had
no choice but to talk because
they had to do something.
At first, Hockley offered to fly
to Texas, to get to work on the
ground. But her staff remem-
bered what had happened after
Parkland, when she’d thrown
herself into the response. Her
body broke down, and she be-
came almost too ill to function.
The reality of that risk — of
this shooting undoing her — felt
only more acute as the day
continued. The death count
grew. The memories resurfaced.
She saw something on the
news about the families in Uval-
de not knowing whose children
had lived and whose had died. It
took her back inside the brick
firehouse up the road from San-
dy Hook. It was there that she
had held on to hope. That she
imagined her Dylan, the blue-
eyed little boy who liked to flap
his arms because he imagined
himself a “butterfly,” running,
hiding, surviving.
“Not my son,” she’d told her-
self.
By Tuesday evening, she was
thinking of how the families in
Texas would have to help identify
their slain children, just as she
had. An officer had asked what
Dylan was wearing, and she’d
told him Velcro sneakers, jeans,
red shirt, SpongeBob Square-
Pants underwear. Later, the po-
lice would give the clothes back,
pocked with bullet holes.
It was impossible not to relive
all of it.
“This didn’t hit close to home,”
she said. “This is home.”
The shock enveloped Oliver,
too, as did sadness and indigna-
tion. But there was no surprise.
From what he’d heard, the
18-year-old Texas shooter didn’t
sound much different from the
19-year-old who killed his son,
Joaquin. The shooters were
about the same age and, appar-
ently, each had easy access to
guns. The aftermath felt familiar,
too: the panic in the parents’ eyes
and the hollowness in the stu-
dents’; the conservative politi-
cians arguing that only more
guns would keep children safe in
schools and the liberal ones
insisting that more guns had
never kept children safe in
schools.
Little had changed after he
lived through all that four years
ago, and he was skeptical that
much would change after watch-
ing it this time.
If there was any consolation, it
was the fresh questions about his
son. He got to talk about them
being best friends, going togeth-
er to Miami Heat games, sharing
thick steaks, introducing eachAnger, anguish among Parkland and Newtown families after new tragedy
JOSHUA LOTT/THE WASHINGTON POSTA man named Eddie takes flowers to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., after Tuesday’s mass shooting there.News overwhelms
families of victims and
survivors of shootings