'Day by day:' Uvalde survivors recover from wounds, trauma
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Bullet fragments lodged in the children's arms and legs. Traumatic flashbacks flooding their nightmares. For the 17 people injured during a mass shooting last week in Uvalde, Texas, healing will be slow in a community mourning the deaths of 21 others.
As the tight-knit town of 16,000 holds funeral after funeral and investigators examine how police responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School, several of the victims are still in hospitals over an hour's drive away in San Antonio, undergoing treatment for bullet wounds.
Uvalde Memorial Hospital, which treated 11 children and four adults in the hours after the shooting, discharged 10 of those patients the same day and transferred five to San Antonio hospitals. The grandmother of the shooter, who was shot in the face before the 18-year-old gunman entered the school, was also hospitalized. On Wednesday, the San Antonio hospitals were still treating five patients, with one 10-year-old girl in serious condition and the rest deemed to be in good condition.
Among the injured were several fourth-grade students whose classmates and teachers were shot to death. One young survivor, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, told CNN that she and a friend used her dead teacher’s cellphone to call 911 and waited for what felt like hours for officers to arrive. Miah, who suffered a bullet fragment to her back, said she covered herself with a friend's blood and pretended to be dead.
“We’re just taking it day by day,” the girl's father, Miguel Cerrillo, told The Associated Press in a brief phone interview Wednesday.
The family is raising money for Miah's medical expenses to treat both injuries caused by the bullet fragment and the mental trauma of surviving the shooting. Cerrillo said that while his daughter is now at...
