“I took my friend’s blood and put it all over me,” Miah Cerrillo shared in a pre-recorded testimony for the U.S. House Committee. “And I thought he would come back to the room.”
Miah is also struggling to heal from the trauma of last week’s shooting. She expressed that she has become fearful about returning to school in case there’s another attack, which we all know can happen at any moment regardless if precautions are taken or not.
When asked about his daughter, Miguel Cerrillo said that she had changed since the tragedy. He pleaded for a change in order to protect children at school from experiencing what Miah and the other children went through, making them safer places where they can learn without fear or anxiety of another shooting.
When the parents of Lexi Rubio addressed Congress, they made an emotional plea asking that their daughter be remembered as more than just “a number.” Mrs.Rubio shared how she ran barefoot with her husband for a mile before learning their daughter fell victim to gun violence.
“We told her we loved her, and we would pick her up after school,” the mother said, fighting back tears while remembering the morning before the shooting. “I left my daughter at that school, and that decision will always haunt me for the rest of my life.”
Zeneta Everhart, the mother of a victim still recovering from injuries at the Buffalo, New York, shooting, spoke at length about how she was cleaning her son’s wounds and hoping to reach out to the lawmakers.
Garnell Whitefield Jr, the son of an 86-year old victim in the Buffalo shooting, challenged Congress to act against the gun violence sweeping across America and the “cancer of white supremacy.”
Standing before the Congress, Dr. Roy Guerrero painted a vivid picture of what he endured in the emergency room at Uvalde, Texas.
“Those mothers’ cries,” he recalled. “I will never get out of my head.”
In an effort to create a compromise that could become law, senators have been meeting with President Joe Biden to secure a deal.
The House passed a bill to raise the minimum age for purchasing semi-automatic weapons, but it’s almost certain that this legislation will not become law as long as the Senate continues its focus on improving mental health programs and school security.
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