“I just want to know what she did to be a victim,” the grieving father said.
Medical aide Angel Garza was at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday following the mass shooting when he learned his own daughter was among the victims.
“One little girl was just covered in blood head to toe. I thought she was injured, I asked her what was wrong. She said she was OK — she was hysterical, saying that they shot her best friend, that they killed her best friend, she was not breathing,” Garza told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday.
“I asked the little girl the name, and … she said Amerie,” the visibly emotional father added about the moment the learned his 10-year-old daughter Amerie Jo Garza was fatally shot by gunman Salvador Ramos who stormed the school and killed 19 children and two teachers.
“She was so sweet, Mr. Cooper. She was the sweetest little girl who did nothing wrong,” Garza said, as reported by Yahoo. “She listened to her mom and dad, she always brushed her teeth. She was creative, she made things for us. She never got in trouble in school. I just want to know what she did to be a victim.”
Garza went on the explain how he broke the heartbreaking news about his daughter’s death to his young son.
“We have a 3-year-old son named Zane who asks for his sister every morning when he wakes up,” he told Cooper. “We’ve informed him that his sister is now with God, and that she will no longer be with us, and, of course, he just cried. I mean, he’s three years old and this is just emotional for him to even process.”
Amerie celebrated her 10th birthday two weeks before the attack.
“How do you look at this girl and just shoot her?” Garza continued, hugging a photo of his slain child. “Oh my baby. How do you shoot my baby?”
Garza wants people to know his daughter died while trying to save her classmates.
“She was just trying to call the cops, that’s all,” he said. “I just want people to know she died trying to save her classmates. She just wanted to save everyone.”
Meanwhile, as reported by The Associated Press, President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday to console families and honor victims of the third-deadliest school shooting in the U.S. behind the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook incident in 2012.
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