“This kind of wound will never heal.” How Uvalde parents learned to grieve in public:
. They stood in front of the sea foam green house and cried together on camera, as Kimberly wailed inside., where the couple moved with their son after May 24. Kimberly, already having postponed the interview once, somehow got herself out of bed and into a pair of sweatpants and a white shirt that she didn’t remember receiving, with an image of Amerie with angel wings. She sat on a couch in front of the camera, without shoes and with barely any makeup.
Kimberly couldn’t keep up with all the messages people wrote her, but she tried to respond to the ones from other parents of little kids. She got to know one mother, who also had a 4-year-old son named Zayne and had mailed Kimberly a pair of tiny Crocs with charms memorializing Amerie: an art palette, a Starbucks cup . Occasionally, people came up to Kimberly and other Uvalde mothers at rallies to say that their social media posts had compelled them to protest for the first time.
IN MID-APRIL, almost 11 debilitating months after the shooting, Kimberly and Angel decided to join some of the families who were trekking to Austin every week to speak with legislators and the media. The Texas House of Representatives convened a bipartisan committee that agreed to hear a new set of gun-reform bills, including one that the Uvalde families had been backing, H.B. 2744, which proposed raising the minimum age required to purchase large-caliber semiautomatic rifles to 21 from 18.
Christina Delgado of Community Justice Action Fund, a gun-violence-prevention group, briefed the families on the day ahead. A 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, blocks away from where her daughter attended junior high, prompted Delgado to become an activist. She told Kimberly and Angel that Representative Rhetta Andrews Bowers had family who lived near Santa Fe. Representative Justin Holland had two daughters. Representative Jarvis Johnson also had children.
Earlier, a lobbyist with the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety sat with some of the families to preview a speech that Representative Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso — where 23 people died during a mass shooting at a Walmart in 2019 — had prepared. Moody helped lead the House investigation into Robb Elementary. He was one of the few people who saw the inside of the school in the aftermath.
ONE MORNING earlier this month, a few cousins and friends came to Angel’s mother’s home to help Kimberly prepare for what would have been Amerie’s 11th birthday. They stuffed glitter pens and notebooks and neon markers into lavender gift bags, and they loaded their cars with canvases and paintbrushes and watercolors. Kimberly planned an art-therapy event — Amerie wanted to be an art teacher when she grew up — at the town square. She had been reluctant to have a party.
AFTER 10-YEAR-OLD AMERIE JO GARZA WAS KILLED AT ROBB ELEMENTARY, KIMBERLY GARCIA AND ANGEL GARZA HAD TO FACE UNIMAGINABLE LOSS WITHOUT THE SOLACE OF PRIVACY.
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