‘It started in the fourth grade building’
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
The deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade, and what’s changed in the years since the massacre in Newtown, Conn.
Read more:
Washington Post reporter Arelis Hernández is on the ground in Uvalde as children and families try to make sense of the violence that tore through Robb Elementary School on Tuesday.
According to a Post database,last year was the deadliest year for school shootings in America since at least 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre. This year is on track to be even worse – and the reasons for that aren’t entirely clear. John Woodrow Cox, who helped create The Post’s tracker, breaks down the massive, sometimes unseen impact of gun violence on American schoolchildren, and the tricky politics of gun control legislation.
Read an excerpt from John’s book, “Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So yesterday I jumped in my car in the afternoon and from my home in San Antonio drove directly |
| 0:10.6 | to Yvaldi and as soon as I got here to the crime scene in the neighborhood where this |
| 0:15.5 | all happened, the first person I met was nine-year-old Jalisa Ibarra and her grandmother |
| 0:22.1 | Marcella Cabrales, who's a local pastor. |
| 0:26.4 | This Arles Hernandez, she's a post-reporter based in Texas and she spoke to us from her |
| 0:31.5 | car in Yvaldi near the site of Tuesday's shooting at an elementary school. |
| 0:36.7 | I asked her grandmother if I could talk to her about what had happened. |
| 0:40.8 | She had just gotten home maybe an hour so earlier from everything that had taken place |
| 0:46.8 | and Jalisa started sort of rapidly describing what she understood about what had happened |
| 0:54.9 | earlier in the day. |
| 0:55.9 | It started getting a few in there. |
| 0:57.9 | It started in the fourth grade building and they started shooting people. |
| 1:02.7 | While I was in lunch we started seeing police and they started doing a lockdown. |
| 1:07.9 | So then they started. |
| 1:09.3 | In her sort of, you know, she's a child, so in sort of a squeaky voice, she tried to lay |
| 1:15.7 | out for me a timeline of where she was, which was in the lunch room when the shooting started |
| 1:23.2 | what her teachers in the lunch room told her to do, which was to go up on the stage in |
| 1:28.1 | the lunch room and hide behind a curtain. |
| 1:31.6 | And what she understood about where her cousin, who also goes to his same school, was at the |
| 1:36.1 | same time. |
| 1:37.1 | And did you hear the shots? |
| 1:39.3 | No, but my cousin did. |
... |
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