Jose Flores grinned wide and held up an honor roll certificate as he posed during an academic ceremony on Tuesday morning. The fourth-grader at Robb Elementary School in Texas was wearing a blue T-shirt in the photo, which was snapped hours before a teenager with a semi-automatic rifle entered his classroom and gunned down little kids.
That shirt, one relative told The Daily Beast, was later used to identify his body.
Jose’s uncle, Christopher Salazar, says that he and the boy’s father searched for hours for his 10-year-old nephew after the massacre at the Uvalde school. Alyssa, Jose’s mother and Salazar’s sister, was away on a work trip when the shooting claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers and chaos unfolded in the tight-knit community. Jose was Alyssa’s oldest child.
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When the boy’s father, Jose Sr., and Salazar were finally informed the child was dead, authorities strongly advised them not to see the body, Salazar says.
“We couldn’t hold him or hug him or nothing,” Salazar said. “They said it was too ugly. His body was supposedly torn to pieces. The only way they identified him was because of his clothes and a scar on his left foot.” (In an interview with CNN, Jose Sr. said that a Texas Ranger told him, “As a father, I wouldn’t let you go back there and see him, because he was not recognizable.”)
Earlier that day, Salazar said, Jose’s dad received a photo from the school of the honor roll event. The father didn’t know the ceremony was taking place, so he didn’t go.
But once the dad got word that shots were fired at his son’s school, he left work and rushed to the building. “They didn’t let us go in,” Salazar said of the police.
Now Salazar is questioning whether cops responded to the scene quickly enough—especially in light of newly released video showing parents desperately pleading with officers to take action as the mass shooting took place inside for about 40 minutes.
Javier Cazares, the father of Jacklyn Cazares, who died in the attack, told the Associated Press that he and other parents wanted to charge into the building. “Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to. More could have been done,” he said. He added of local law enforcement: “They were unprepared.”
Salazar agrees, telling The Daily Beast, “There was a lot of failure.”
“They didn’t want to go in there,” Salazar said of the police. “Me, if that guy was still alive, I would have went in and got him myself.”
“The police from Uvalde were standing way in the back, instead of standing closer, like the Border Patrol and SWAT team. The cops from here in Uvalde were standing back like they didn’t know what to do.”
“Instead of being in front and being for the kids, they weren’t,” Salazar added. “I am kind of angry. If I saw somebody with a gun going into Robb, I would have tried to do something.”
Angeli Rose Gomez, who has two sons at Robb Elementary School, drove 40 miles to the school after hearing about the shooting. She told the Wall Street Journal, “The police were doing nothing.”
Gomez said she and other parents at the scene demanded officers do something, and that federal marshals soon put her in handcuffs, saying she was interfering in an active investigation. She says she was uncuffed after persuading local Uvalde cops she knew to let her go and ran towards the school, jumped a fence, and raced inside to rescue her kids. “She sprinted out of the school with them,” the Journal reported.
The scene was chaotic, Gomez added, and she witnessed one dad tackled by cops and another father pepper-sprayed.
Like other families whose kids were missing in wake of the shooting, Salazar and Jose Sr. searched frantically for hours, driving from the school to the civic center to the local hospital.
Authorities approached Jose’s dad and asked him to call a family member or someone who could be with him before they shared some information. According to Salazar, detectives initially told Jose Sr. that his son was still alive.
“They finally told him, ‘Look, are you OK to hear what I have to tell you? No, he did not make it,’” Salazar recalled.
“They lied to him. They wanted some family members to comfort him while they told him his son was gone already,” Salazar said. “I got into an argument with the cops in there. I said, ‘I don’t care if you lock me up or whatever. You lied to him. Telling him he’s alive, he’s alright…’”
The family is now preparing for a funeral for Jose, nicknamed “Baby Jose,” who leaves behind two younger siblings. Salazar told The Daily Beast on Thursday that he was preparing to pick up Jose’s mother Alyssa from the airport.
Salazar remembers Jose as a sweet boy who played baseball, loved fishing, and eating hot wings, hot Cheetos, and slushies. He talked about wanting to be a police officer someday. And, perhaps unusual for kids his age, he loved cleaning.
“He used to come to my house, he’d start cleaning, and I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ He goes, ‘I’m bored. I’m cleaning.’” Jose also loved being on Tik Tok and playing music.
The day before the shooting, Jose asked to call his mom.
“We called his mom because she was working. We got a hold of my sister. And he was like, ‘Mommy, I want you to come home.’ I think he knew what was going to happen or something. He had a feeling. He goes, ‘Mommy, when you come home I want to live with you forever.’”
If Salazar ever teased Jose’s mom, the boy would scold his uncle.
“He was like, ‘That’s my mommy, don’t be like that.’ He even said he would protect his mom all the way. He was real sentimental.”
