Texas shooting: Girl, 10, told mother she didn’t want to go to school before being shot dead in Uvalde attack

The mother of one of the girls killed had recently lost her father as well

The Uvalde shooting is a cascade of tragic stories.

One of those stories is that of Jailah Silguero, 10, a fourth-grader who wanted to stay home from class on Tuesday.

With only two days left in the school year, Jailah's mother did the responsible thing that any mother would do and insisted her daughter go to school. She could not possibly have known that her daughter would not come home that day.

Jailah's grandmother, Linda Gonzales, spoke with The Daily Beast, telling her that she "didn't want to go to school yesterday."

"That's what her momma was really upset about last night: 'If only I had let her stay home,'" she said.

Ms Gonzales said the girl was "disappointed" and "wanted to stay home with momma."

Late on Tuesday evening Veronica Luevanos, Jailah's mother, learned her daughter had been among the 19 fourth-graders killed earlier that day.

Jailah's cousin, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, was also killed.

The attack on Tuesday only added to the deep pain that family was already feeling; just a week prior, a memorial was held for Ms Luevanos' father, who had recently died. Her father was in Mexico, so they were unable to see him before he passed.

“I told Veronica last night, ‘Just look at it as your daddy taking your baby with him,’" Ms Gonzales said.

She said the children were "sweet kids and lovable."

“I don’t have words," she said. "We think this is a small community, it can’t happen here, but oh my God, it’s happening anywhere.”

Ms Gonzales said on the day of the shooting that Ms Luevanos' phone had died while they were waiting outside the school and the Uvalde civic centre for updates. She said they did not realise that the students who had been killed were still in the school.

“They didn’t realize there were dead children in the school,” Ms Gonzales said. “They kept telling them: go to [the] hospital or go to the civic center. Nobody was told there’s dead kids in there. Nobody.”

The family will likely forever carry the pain of that day with them. One of Ms Gonzales's nephews, a sheriff's deputy, was one of the responders to the shooting.

He was forced to go home because his clothes had been drenched with blood.

“He picked up some children to lay them in someplace so they could be covered,” Ms Gonzales said. “He’ll never forget the scene.”