Uvalde official identifies shooting victims, discovers classmates and friends' children

Eulalio Diaz Jr. stepped into the fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School hours after the shooting stopped. On the floor lay the body of Irma Garcia, one of two teachers killed that day. Diaz recognized her immediately. They had gone through junior high and high school together in Uvalde, Texas. She was a year behind him.

As the Justice of the Peace for Uvalde County, Diaz held a role that few people want and fewer still are prepared for. The county has no medical examiner, so the responsibility for identifying the dead falls to him. On May 24, 2022, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at the school. All of them would need to be identified, and Diaz would be the one to do it.

Before he entered the building, the 49-year-old tried to steel himself for what he might see. He thought about the worst possible scene he could imagine. Nothing he had prepared himself for matched what he actually witnessed. Scattered through the classroom were the bodies of fourth graders whose parents were his friends. The small town of Uvalde, where everybody knows everybody, had become a place where that familiarity only deepened the wound.

Identifying children presented its own brutal logic. They don't carry identification cards. They don't wear name badges. Many of the bodies were severely damaged by gunfire. Diaz tried to spare the families additional trauma by asking parents to describe the clothes their children had worn to school that day, or by looking at photographs they brought him. He hoped these details would be enough to make a positive identification without requiring the families to see their children's remains. The damage was too extensive. The Texas Rangers ordered DNA swabs from family members. The identification process would take longer, but it would be certain.

When Diaz returned home that evening, his phone began filling with messages on Facebook. He realized he knew not just the parents of the victims, but their grandparents too. The interconnectedness of the community, which under normal circumstances might feel like a source of strength and belonging, had become a source of almost unbearable pain. Every victim had a face he recognized. Every family had a story he knew.

Diaz spoke about his work with a kind of quiet clarity, as if naming the task might help him carry it. "My job is to make sure that we release the body of the correct person to their family," he said. "My job is to get the bodies of these children back to their families." The words came slowly, his voice trailing away as he spoke them.

Yet Diaz held onto something else too. He believed that the very thing that made this tragedy so personal—the fact that in Uvalde, everyone is connected to everyone else—might also be what allows the community to heal. "We all feel such anguish," he said. "But we all are here to support one another." In a town where grief is collective and unavoidable, so too, he hoped, would be the capacity to grieve together.