A mother of a student at Robb Elementary School is recounting the aftermath of a horrific shooting that left 19 people, including 18 children dead.
On Tuesday, a shooter, identified as Uvalde resident Salvador Romas, opened fire at the Texas elementary school at about 11:30 a.m. local time after abandoning his vehicle. The shooter was later killed by authorities but not before he changed dozens of families’ lives forever.
Evelyn, whose third-grader attends Robb Elementary, tells PEOPLE that the school’s automated system alerted parents via a phone message that an active shooter was on school grounds. The students were then moved to the Uvalde Civic Center to be reunited with their parents.
“I didn’t know if my son was alive or dead, I didn’t know what was happening,” Evelyn tells PEOPLE.
She says it felt like “a nightmare,” adding that “it was something I have always, been in fear of. I was very scared, because this was very scary, and I had been afraid of this for my entire life.”
“I see the school shootings and I think this is a small city and that happens in big cities, but it happened here and it almost killed my son.”
Beginning to cry, Evelyn shares, “I don’t know what to do, I can’t think. I can’t stop walking around because I think [about] what could have happened.”
Sharing her emotions as she headed to the civic center, Evelyn says, “I don’t drive, my husband was working and he came home and took me and we prayed the whole time in the car to Jesus and asked ‘Please don’t let my son die.’ My husband did not say anything, but I could not stop crying the whole way. He said ‘We should wait to see what happens and that he’s probably okay,’ but I didn’t know. I was just praying, praying, praying the whole time.”
Once at the civic center, Evelyn recalls, “There were people everywhere, lots of people were crying.”
Outside of the building, people were told to form a single-file line in order to get inside and were searched for weapons.
“No one wanted to wait, and a few people yelled at the police because it took a long time to get into the place. They asked that one parent only go in so that there were less people in there, so I went in and my husband waited in the car. He told me to send him a text, but I didn’t have service because everyone was on their phones so I couldn’t tell him what was happening
When she was able to lay eyes on her son, Evelyn says he was in tears and “was so scared and he was like ‘Mama, Mama, Mama’ and we hugged and I cried. I told him he was very brave, and I hugged and kissed him a lot. I keep hugging and kissing him because I know he is here with me and I am happy.”
Evelyn says she doesn’t know any of the victims, however, she points out that “it is not a big school, it’s small. So I know he will know lots of the children who are dead.”
When asked what’s next, the mother –– who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her husband before welcoming their 9-year-old son –– tells PEOPLE, “I do not want my son to go to school in America anymore, I want to go back home and he will be safe there. This is too dangerous.”
She adds, “I will not sleep. I can never sleep thinking of this. When I close my eyes, I will think of these children, and I will think of my son and I will not sleep. It will be too hard.”
Police said at a Tuesday press conference they believe the shooter, who according to Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott had a handgun and possibly a rifle, acted alone. The children killed were in the second, third, and fourth grades, police said.
Uvalde is a small city of about 16,000 residents, approximately 85 miles west of San Antonio.
In 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the U.S., surpassing motor vehicle crashes, according to The New England Journal of Medicine
