Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grade student in Uvalde, Texas, who smeared a dead classmate’s blood on herself to avoid being targeted by the gunman who killed 19 students and two teachers in her classroom, described the nightmarish attack in a video played before members of Congress on Wednesday.

Miah, 11, was among several people who testified at the hearing on gun violence. In the pre-recorded video, she said she had been watching a movie with her classmates when one of her teachers got an email and then moved to lock the door. The teacher had told students, “Go hide,” she said, and they hid behind backpacks and their teacher’s desk.

“He shot my friend that was next to me,” Miah said. “And I thought he would come back to the room.”

She took blood from her friend and rubbed it over herself so that she would appear dead, and she then called 911 from her teacher’s phone, asking for the police.

“I said we needed help,” she said.

In the video, she was asked what she wanted to come from the mass shooting.

“To have security,” she told members of Congress. She shook her head when she was asked if she felt safe at school. “I don’t want it to happen again.” Her father, Miguel Cerrillo, testified briefly in Washington, saying that Miah had changed since the shooting. He pleaded for some kind of change to protect children in school.

“I came because I could’ve lost my baby girl,” Cerrillo said through tears and sniffles. “And she’s not the same little girl that I used to play with and run with and do everything, because she was Daddy’s little girl.”

“I wish something would change,” he said. “Not only for our kids, but every single kid in the world, because schools are not safe anymore.”

‘Guns not kids’

Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, known as Lexi, had big goals: She wanted to get a degree in math and attend law school. But those dreams were shattered when a gunman stormed her fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, killing Lexi, 18 of her classmates and two teachers.

Her parents, Kimberly and Felix Rubio, testified before Congress on Wednesday about their daughter’s lost dreams — and what could be done to prevent similar tragedies in America, where mass shootings have become commonplace in small towns and urban areas alike.

“That opportunity was taken from her; she was taken from us,” Rubio said via a live video stream. “We understand that for some reason, to some people, to people with money, the people who fund political campaigns, that guns are more important than children.”

Rubio pleaded with Congress to change gun laws that allow dangerous weapons to be used by the wrong people. She wants to see the age requirement to buy military-style rifles like the AR-15 raised to 21, as well as stronger background checks on gun buyers.

The Rubios described desperately looking for their daughter after news broke that there had been a shooting at her school. Just hours earlier, like many parents, Rubio had attended an awards ceremony for Lexi. Leaving her behind at the school after the ceremony, Rubio said, was the biggest regret of her life.

(New York Times News Service)