A Year After the Uvalde Shooting, Robb Elementary Student Remembers Her Slain Best Friend
On the morning of May 24, 2022, Uvalde resident Gladys Gonzalez received a phone call that would be any parent’s nightmare.
Her 10-year-old daughter’s school, Robb Elementary, was on lockdown due to “gunshots in the area,” the automated message said.
Gladys would soon learn that the gunman was actually inside the school. For the next several hours, she and her husband had no idea if their daughter, Caitlyne, a fourth grade student, was safe.
“Just not knowing how my daughter was or where she was, it just— it was the worst feeling,” Gladys tells Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa in the above excerpt from After Uvalde: Guns, Grief and Texas Politics.
The new documentary, a collaboration among FRONTLINE, Futuro Investigates and The Texas Tribune, probes one of the deadliest school shootings in American history, in which an 18-year-old gunman with an AR-15-style rifle killed 19 children and two adults. With Hinojosa as correspondent, the documentary investigates lingering questions about how this tragedy happened, scrutinizes the police response, examines gun politics in Texas, and explores how some of the Robb Elementary families have navigated their transformed lives in the year since the shooting.
As After Uvalde reports, Caitlyne would ultimately be evacuated that day from her classroom, which was across the hall from where the massacre happened.
Her best friend, 9-year-old Jackie Cazares, who had just had her first communion, was among the dead.
In the above excerpt from After Uvalde, Caitlyne describes her friendship with Jackie. The two girls had been inseparable for years.
“When did you meet?” Hinojosa asks Caitlyne.
“Oh, she was on a swing, and she was playing by herself, so I asked her if she wanted to play with me,” Caitlyne responds. “And she said yes, and then we kept talking, and yeah.”
Caitlyne remembers Jackie’s laugh; how funny she was. And as the documentary reports, in the year after her best friend’s death, Caitlyne — like Jackie’s parents, Javier and Gloria Cazares — has channeled her grief into campaigning for legislation that would raise the age at which one can purchase assault-style weapons in Texas from 18 to 21.
“I remember hearing my best friend’s screams,” Caitlyne says at a gun reform rally in footage that appears later in the documentary. “The next day, I got the news from my mom. The worst news any child could get. I shouldn’t have to be here, speaking. I am only ten years old. But I am because my friends have no voice no more.”
Jackie’s mom, Gloria, tells Hinojosa, “We’re not trying to take anybody’s guns away. It’s just gone on for so long that we have to meet somewhere in the middle, and how is raising the age not in the middle?”
Jackie’s dad, Javier, agrees.
“I’m a gun owner. I can still carry,” he tells Hinojosa. “We just want to make this a better and safer place for — my daughter, not anymore, but somebody else’s child.”
The After Uvalde team explores how gun reform has been a deeply polarizing issue in Texas for decades, meets those who oppose raising the age for purchasing assault-style weapons, examines the status of efforts to find legislative common ground — and looks at how families like Caitlyne’s and Jackie’s are still searching for answers about May 24, 2022.
In the clip, Hinojosa asks Caitlyne’s mom whether she talks to her daughter about the day of the shooting.
“I try not to bring it up, but there’s just a part of her that has become obsessed in wanting to understand what happened,” Gladys says. “You know, the one place where she was supposed to have been safe, and she wasn’t.”
For the full story, watch After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas Politics. The documentary premieres Tues., May 30, 2023, at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. It will be available to stream that same night at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App.
After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas Politics is a FRONTLINE production with Futuro Investigates, a division of Futuro Media. The director is Amy Bucher. The producer and co-director is Heidi Burke. The writers are Amy Bucher and Heidi Burke. The correspondent is Maria Hinojosa. The documentary includes reporting from Texas Tribune reporters Uriel J. García, Jinitzail Hernández, Zach Despart and reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, Perla Trevizo. The editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune is Sewell Chan. The executive producers of Futuro Investigates are Peniley Ramírez and Maria Hinojosa. The president of Futuro Media is Julio Ricardo Varela. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.