UVALDE, Texas (BP) – Ten minutes. Maybe 12. That’s the time from when Neftali Barboza and his wife, Hilda, left Robb Elementary School yesterday until The Call. Their son, Levi, still had his All A’s Honor Roll certificate and was in the truck with them. The caller was relieved to hear it, because a shooter had just entered the school.
Barboza, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Nueva Jericho, turned the truck around. Approaching the school, he saw police and recognized the helicopters circling overhead as being the same ones he worked on as a mechanic with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. His friend had called from the funeral home across the street and asked for Barboza’s help in calming the numerous children who had fled there in terror.
“I stayed and helped take care of the kids,” he said. “I let as many parents as I could know their child was safe. We were there an hour or two; I’m not really sure.”
As a parent and local pastor, Barboza has joined others trying to make sense of the shooting that claimed the lives of 19 children and two adults as well as left others in critical condition. Uvalde is a close-knit town full of people who stick together and pray for each other, he told Baptist Press. It’s the place where these kinds of things aren’t supposed to happen.
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“My heart is broken,” he said. “I can only imagine what other families are going through.”
The shooting is the third deadliest on a school campus in the nation’s history, behind 33 killed at Virginia Tech University in 2007 and the 28 deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
What becomes a list for observers will remain an indelible mark for those close to the scene. Barboza knew many of those families. His son had friends in the classroom – on the same hall as his – where the shooter barricaded himself before a Border Patrol agent ended the carnage.
No members of Barboza’s church were directly harmed in the shooting, though one member has a niece whose daughter was among the wounded. Tommy Larner, director of missions for the Del Rio-Uvalde Baptist Association, said a pastor contacted him yesterday for prayer. A man who had been attending his church off and on lost his granddaughter in the shooting.
“You can’t come up with adjectives to describe such a horrible act,” Larner said. “Please pray that the people here would experience the tender love of our Heavenly Father and for pastors to be able to share that the only hope is through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
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Larner is a retired International Mission Board missionary, having just returned from an Orlando event honoring IMB emeriti. He and his wife served for 15-and-a-half years in Ecuador, nine years in Mexico and five in Peru.
