In the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo revealed that she used the blood of a fallen classmate to pretend she was already dead.
Dressed in a sunflower tank top and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, Cerrillo, two weeks after witnessing her friends and teacher die in a deadly school shooting, answered questions for two minutes on video about what she endured that day in the classroom.
“He shot my teacher and told my teacher good night and shot her in the head,” she said in the prerecorded video shown at a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “And then he shot some of my classmates and the white board.”
A number of Uvalde survivors and family members spoke at the U.S House hearing on Wednesday about the tragedy that occurred due to gun violence in their communities. The youngest one of that small group was Cerrillo.
A lone gunman armed with two assault rifles murdered twenty school children and two teachers and injured seventeen others on May 24.
On that day, Cerillo said that she and her classmates were watching a movie. Her teacher received an email and then got up to lock the door. That’s when the teacher made eye contact with the gunman in the hallway.
At that point, the teacher told the students to go and hide, which Isabel did behind her teacher’s desk where the backpacks were. Then the shooter shot at the little window, presumably the one leading to the hallway. In an interview, she said that the gunman walked into a neighboring classroom, used an adjoining door to enter her classroom, and opened fire. A student, a friend of hers, was sitting next to her at the backpacks.
“I thought [the gunman] was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed the blood and I put it all over me,” she said.
She said she “stayed quiet” and then she grabbed her teacher’s phone and called 911.
“I told [the operator] that we need help and to send the police [to my] classroom,” she said.
According to Cerrillo, she doesn’t feel safe in school and worries it will happen again. Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician, asked her questions off camera including if she thought a shooting like this will happen again. The little girl’s reply was affirmative. Cerrillo was unperturbed and stoic, never showing emotion. However, some of the Uvalde adults that testified had to choke back tears, including her father, Miguel Cerrillo, who had traveled to Washington to testify in person.
“I come because I could have lost my baby girl, but she’s not the same baby girl I used to play with,” he said, adding that “schools are not safe anymore.”
