11-year-old Uvalde survivor testifies about playing dead to escape gunman

Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old who survived last month’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, delivered harrowing testimony in a House hearing about gun violence on Wednesday. 

The hearing centered around the Uvalde massacre as well as the deadly mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, allegedly carried out by a white supremacist days earlier. But it was meant to address the scourge of gun violence more broadly, and it came on the heels of more recent mass shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Philadelphia.

Cerrillo was invited to share her experience at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, where she said she covered herself in a classmate’s blood to play dead with hopes the shooter would pass over her. In a pre-recorded video, she described how the gunman shot her teacher and said, “Goodnight.” How she saw her classmate killed before her eyes. How she sought refuge behind desks and backpacks. And how she eventually called and pleaded for help from the police, who we now know had been waiting outside throughout the entire ordeal. 

Cerrillo made it out alive, but her haunting account is proof that gun violence survivors carry a heavy mental and emotional burden that can torment them for a lifetime. Conservative lawmakers’ continued refusal to back gun reforms most Americans want is in defiance of those lost to gun violence, and people like Cerrillo, who live with the consequences of their inaction. 

The image of Cerrillo sharing with the world the increasingly common experience of gun death felt historic. It felt like the sort of thing that, if not for the sickening commonness of mass shootings, would be easily remembered and memorialized in textbooks. 

Coincidentally, her testimony came on the anniversary of another historic image that evoked widespread shame. Fifty years ago to the day, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl, was pictured running from a napalm attack that had burned her village and the clothes from her body. The infamous photo — widely known as “Napalm Girl” — is the defining image of the Vietnam War, embodying all of its senseless violence and destruction. 

An 11-year-old having to publicly plead for safety from gun violence after dousing herself in blood to hide from a school shooter is, just like “Napalm Girl,” a sick indictment of the violence we’re permitting in our society.