Angel Garza, Amerie Jo Garza.Photo: Courtesy Berlinda Arreola
As he was tending to a young girl who’d emerged fromthe Robb Elementary Schoolcovered in blood, Angel Garza learned that his stepdaughter,Amerie Jo Garza, wasone of the 19 studentskilled Tuesday ina mass shootingthat alsoclaimed two teachers.
Angel’s mother, Berlinda Arreola, tells PEOPLE her son, a Certified Medical Assistant, had raised Amerie, 10, as his own, and that he rushed to the Uvalde schoolafter learning gunfire had been reportedthere.
“He was helping children,” Arreola explains, because responding EMTs “were trying to assist with everything going on.”
One little girl “ran out and she was covered in blood — covered, saturated in blood. And so he ran to her before she even came out and he’s like, ‘Are you hurt? Where were you hurt?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m not, I’m not, it’s not my blood,'” Arreola relays. “And he goes, ‘Are you sure?'”
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Garza, according to Arreola, couldn’t believe the girl was unharmed, “because the blood was overwhelming — all over her.”
The girl told Garza the blood on her was that of her best friend Amerie — Garza’s stepdaughter.
Angel Garza, Amerie Jo Garza.GoFundMe
“He could have just taken her phone away,” Arreola says of the shooter. “He could have just broke it — done something. And he just shot her. Just … she was one of the first ones that was killed. She was basically shot within probably five minutes.”
Prior to the massacre in Uvalde, a small city about 85 miles west of San Antonio, the shootershot his grandmother in the face.
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A responding off-duty U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent killed the suspect. A motive for the murders, if known, has not been released.
Police said at a Tuesday press conference they believethe shooter acted alone.
The children killed were in the second, third, and fourth grades, police confirmed.
source: people.com
