Elaine Aradillas has covered 17 mass shootings since she joined PEOPLE 15 years ago. “My first one was theDark Knightshooting in Aurora, Colorado,” she told me. “My last one was less than two weeks ago in Buffalo.”
That was before the events in Uvalde, Texas. So now the number is 18. “It never gets easier,” she told me. “And this one was personal.”
Elaine, a veteran writer from the PEOPLE crime team, is based in New York, but during the pandemic she returned to her hometown of San Antonio, east of Uvalde, where a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers on May 24.
Liz Vaccariello.Mettie Ostrowski
Elaine Aradillas.Ilana Panich-Linsman
What Elaine described to me from the scene that first day will stay with me forever: “I was at the reunification center for most of the day, the gathering place for family members who couldn’t locate their children. I was sitting on this stone bench. It was nothing but journalists and police officers, but in the distance you could see the family members who hadn’t located their children,” she says. “You could see them hugging each other, comforting each other as they waited.”
The longer the wait, the worse the news.
“At 10 o’clock at night, the glow from the windows of the civic center is all that’s illuminating the town,” Elaine continued. “All of a sudden I heard a mother wailing. That sound was about 50 feet away and emanated from inside another building. Everyone just sat there and listened in stunned silence. Everyone respected what was happening at that moment—and we made ourselves listen to the grief.”
For Elaine Aradillas, a first-generation Mexican American, this shooting is in a town that feels eerily like home, from the familiar taco trucks that dot the landscape to the Mexican American faces that look like her own aunts and uncles, father and mother. “Every shooting is different,” she told me. “But you never think it’s going to happen in your area. I know all too well it can.”
source: people.com
