Briana and Daniel Ruiz.Photo:Courtesy of Briana Ruiz
Courtesy of Briana Ruiz
Even the “lucky” children who walked away from the deadly Robb Elementary School shooting last year are forever changed.
In a recent interview with PEOPLE, Briana Ruiz, 33, whose 10-year-old son Daniel “Tres” Ruiz Garza was a fourth grader two doors down from the classroom in which the carnage took place, tells PEOPLE that Daniel “lives with his scars daily.”
People tell Briana her kid should be okay just because he is alive. But he is not okay, she says.
“He went through something very traumatic,” she says, adding that Daniel’s teacher was shot. “He saw his teacher lying in a pool of blood. His teacher was telling him, ‘Get me help!’"
And while Daniel survived, the childhood he was living — Daniel was always smiling, dancing and making people laugh — ended that day, his mother says.
“Thankfully, these kids walked out of that building alive,” she says. “But they were all in that building together.”
Briana and Daniel Ruiz.Courtesy of Briana Ruiz
Briana and her son advocate for mental health awareness, posting on social media and sharing with the media Daniel’s ongoing battle with PTSD, anxiety and survivor’s guilt. He wishes that he had been in the same classroom with his favorite cousin,Ellie Garcia, who was killed.
Ellie Garcia.Facebook
“He blames himself a lot,” Briana says. “He’s always been her protector. … He feels like he could have saved her, or he would’ve died with her.”
‘He Needed to Make Sure His Friends Were Safe’
On May 24, 2022 Briana’s dad heard about the active shooter on a citizens band radio, so she rushed to the school. “You could hear the shooting,” she remembers.
Her son’s teacher, Elsa Avila, broke her key in the lock to keep the shooter out of the classroom. But the teacher was still shot in the stomach.
Daniel and Briana Ruiz.Courtesy of Briana Ruiz
Daniel was one of the helpers in the classroom, trying to keep his teacher awake and from passing out after being shot, and praying. He and a friend helped a classmate who’d been shot in the face leave the classroom first. Then he helped the rest of the students climb out the window.
“He needed to make sure his friends were safe,” Briana says.
Waiting outside the school, his mother remembers hearing kids shouting, “More kids coming!”
“We had made lines of parents, so that way the kids could just run through,” Briana remembers. “Me and other parents are like, ‘Just go, just go, keep running.'"
She saw his classmates, but when she didn’t see Daniel, she feared the worst.
“I can’t even describe the feeling that I felt because it felt so ugly. My head instantly was just like, ‘He’s dead. He’s dead,’” Briana says.
When Daniel emerged from the classroom, he held onto his mother and didn’t want to let go.
“I remember an officer trying to grab towards my son, and I swing my hand towards her and she’s like, ‘They need to go to the funeral home.’ And I yelled at her and I’m like, ‘I know where they need to go. Just don’t pull him out of my hands,'" Briana remembers.
“Daniel was just grabbing onto me as hard as he could. … He’s just like, ‘I just want to go with you. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me mom. Don’t leave me.'”
Daniel has 23 cousins who were students at Robb Elementary School. His mom urged Daniel to listen to the officer, go inside the funeral home, look for his cousins and make sure everyone was safe.
“I told him, ‘Make sure everybody’s good. Make sure everyone’s there.’”
Then, Daniel called Briana — and said his cousin Ellie was missing.
“He said, ‘I’ve looked everywhere and she’s not here,'” Briana remembers.
‘He’s Like, ‘It’s My Fault’’
Meanwhile, Briana went to the Civic Center with her cousins. There, she learned that the shooter was one of her former students, when she worked as an inclusion aide.
“The rage I felt, I don’t know how to explain it,” she says. “One of my students, went and did this to all my other students, my son, my cousins like why?”
Before bed that evening, Daniel’s mother discovered hundreds of shards of glass embedded under Daniel’s arms, in his stomach and his legs. She wanted to take him to the hospital — but he refused. She spent hours pulling the glass out.
During the school year, Briana works as a preschool teacher. Before the shooting, she spent summers working in the fields with her family members picking cabbage, cotton and watermelon. She used to take her kids with her. But she hasn’t been able to work the last two summers because of her son’s mental health struggles.
“He told the doctor, “I don’t want to be alive. I wish he would’ve done something to me too,"” Briana tells PEOPLE. “Nothing has hurt me as much as hearing my son say those words.”
So, the single mother of four kids — ages, 5, 8, 10 and 15 — stays home keeping an eye on her son. She often makes extra cash selling Birria tacos, but she doesn’t have enough money to buy the ingredients right now, or pay her mortgage and car note. When Daniel overhears her worrying about money, talking to her oldest son who offered to drop out of band camp and get a job, he blames himself.
“He’s like, ‘It’s my fault. All of this is my fault because you have to stay home with me and make sure I’m okay,'” she says.
“It terrifies me, because his PTSD is so high and his anxiety is so high and he’s just running,” she says. “It scares the hell out of me because I don’t want him to run into the road not paying attention.”
Anything can trigger Daniel’s PTSD: When his little brother smashed his Paw Patrol cars together it sounded like gunshots, so Daniel took them and threw them. He used to like playing “Call of Duty;” now he can’t go near his favorite video game. Sometimes “Fortnite” triggers him too.
Briana launched aGoFundMeto help raise money so she can afford to take her son approximately 90 miles to San Antonio to a psychiatrist who specializes in trauma.
His mom started therapy a month ago herself. “It’s impacted all of us,” she says. “The year teaching was a very stressful year.”
Her son worried about her: He knows how much she loves her students, and he worries that in the event of another mass shooting, she would sacrifice herself to save the kids in her classroom.
Before that day, he was a boy who was always smiling and dancing. “He was just a goofy kid,” she says. “Always making everybody laugh.”
Now, whenever he feels happy or smiles for a rare moment, he immediately feels bad afterward.
“He gets upset,” he says. “He feels it’s not fair that he gets to smile, or he gets to feel happy, because his cousin and his friends don’t get to feel any of those things anymore.”
source: people.com
