This story is based on a conversation with Gloria Cazares, 42, a home healthcare nurse from Uvalde, Texas, whose daughter, Jackie, 9, was killed during the Robb Elementary School shooting. She appears in the Netflix short documentary “All The Empty Rooms,” premiering on December 1. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
My husband, Javier, 45, has gone into our daughter Jackie’s bedroom every day since she passed, because he feels closer to her there.
He recites a prayer that they used to say together each night: “Angels East, angels West, North and South. Just do your best. Watch me and protect me while I rest.”
The words bring some comfort, but the room should be filled with joy, warmth, and life as it once was.
We’ve kept it just as it was when Jackie, a fourth grader, left for school on May 24, 2022. We never thought of changing it because it pays tribute to the memory of our bright, funny little girl.
The bedroom pays tribute to Jackie’s memory
The walls are painted purple and pink, her favorite colors, and a string of LED lights surrounds the ceiling. They shine bright to this day.
Javier, a glazer and talented in art, painted a unicorn on one of the walls. She loved it, especially because her dad used fluorescent paint, so it glows in the dark. Beneath it, there’s a fairy swinging on a heart.
Recordings of Jackie’s voice are inside two Build-A-Bears
She watched the cartoon “Miraculous,” set in Paris, and was obsessed with the city. Her pink and white comforter is covered with miniature Eiffel Towers, and she had other Paris-themed knickknacks, such as an Eiffel Tower-shaped box to store her jewelry.
There are plushies on her bed, and Build-A-Bears that were gifted to us after she died. Two of the bears contain recordings of her voice. She’s singing a song in one and laughing out loud with her dogs in the other.
Those recordings bring back her personality, always characterized by kindness to others. She loved to look after people and take on a responsible role. If she were at a birthday party, she wanted to serve the ice cream or cut the cake.
Jackie was also enthusiastic and smart. Javier and I attended a special awards ceremony at her school on the morning of the shooting. It celebrated the students’ accomplishments. That was the last time I saw my daughter.
A coworker wrote that there was an active shooter at the school
We left the ceremony at 11:08 a.m., timestamped by a photo I sent to Jackie’s phone of her with some friends when they were younger. Later, we found out that the shooting had started at 11:33 a.m.
I was back at work and leaving a patient’s house when I received a text from a coworker close to noon. She’d heard there was an active shooter inside Jackie’s school.
Instinct made me drive to the school. The moment I was on the main highway, I saw police cars and other law enforcement vehicles rushing in the same direction. I followed behind them.
I got to a block away and joined other parents who had gathered on the opposite side of the fourth-grade hallway. Then we heard gunfire. It was chaotic.
The hospital nurses wanted to speak to my husband and me
Javier was there by then, and children were later loaded onto buses. But they couldn’t find Jackie. My niece heard that they were taking students to the hospital and headed that way because she was closer.
She saw an ambulance pulling into the ER and a little girl being taken out on a stretcher. She looked like Jackie. When Javier and I got to the hospital, they wouldn’t tell us anything for hours. Then, around 4 p.m., two rangers and a chaplain said the nurses wanted to speak to us.
They said they had a child who matched our daughter’s description and wanted us to identify her body. It was Jackie. She was gone forever.
I have an ache in my heart
Three and a half years on, grief is part of me now. Some days you can just carry it with you, and there are other days when it just knocks the wind out of you. The days when I talk about her and share her personality and our deep love for her help a little bit with the ache in my heart.
Meanwhile, whenever Javier and I go to her bedroom, our eyes settle on Jackie’s comforter. She wanted to visit Paris when she was older. We might have taken the trip as a graduation gift for her.
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