Parents of a survivor from the Texas school shooting said she smeared blood on herself to play dead and escape the shooter.
A woman cries and hugs a young girl while on the phone outside the Willie de Leon Civic Center (AFP)
Parents of an 11-year-old student said she played dead and smeared blood on her body to escape the bloody carnage that unfolded on Wednesday.
Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old student at the Texas elementary school, where 19 students and two teachers were gunned down, smeared blood on her body to convince the gunman that she too was dead. The fourth-grade student got into what her aunt called ‘survivor mode’ after she saw her friend get fatally shot inside the classroom.
She also managed to grab her dead teacher’s phone to call 911 and ask for help before playing dead. Miah was left with multiple bullet fragments on her back.
“My sister-in-law said that she saw her friend full of blood, and she got blood and put it on herself,” her aunt said.
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Even as she survived the shooting, one of the deadliest mass shootings in the US, her family said the experience has left her traumatized and she even got panic attacks on the night of the incident.
Miguel Cerrillo, the father of the survivor, told the media that when he reached the school, he saw a police officer carrying his bloodied daughter out of the building. She was then put on the school bus but her father was not allowed to join her.
But he could talk to her through the window. She told her father what she had witnessed.
The New York Post reported that the fourth-grader told her dad “that she saw her teacher Eva Mireles get shot as she was holding her phone, Cerrillo recounted. Miah grabbed Mireles’ phone and used it to dial 911.”
When the gunman shot her friend, she decided to play dead by lying on top of the girl, who was bleeding profusely.
After being released by the police, she was treated at a local hospital and released.