Uvalde dad is awash in grief and anger, knowing his little girl will never grow up

Alfred Garza III spends a lot of time in his modest living room surrounded by photos of his daughter, Amerie Jo. The biggest is a school portrait — she stares straight at you, a half-smile on her face and a small earring in her pierced left ear. Garza’s little girl is growing up in that photo, an adjustment all its own for any parent, now frozen in time. That is one of the things — maybe the biggest thing — gnawing at him. Amerie Jo was 10 when she was shot to death. Robbed of her in the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School that claimed 18 other fourth-graders and two teachers, Garza is trying to make sense of it. He quit his job as a car salesman and is in no rush to return to work. His other plans? Well, what plans? “Yeah, sometimes not doing anything, you know?” said Garza, 35. “I do think it’s good to stay busy, so that way it gets your mind off things, but I do also think it’s good to reflect and sometimes take time to think about stuff, so that way so we can process it.”

He visits with friends and attends public meetings. He has joined gatherings of bereaved families — but since he didn’t have legal custody of his daughter, he has been kicked out of some of them. He takes photos of the murals and benches dedicated to Amerie Jo’s memory. Garza also posts frequently on Facebook. On occasion, the messages are alarming. “God help me,” he wrote Aug. 3. “The devil is lurking…” Grief has affected all of Uvalde. It affects individuals in different ways. “The situation has brought out the ugly in some people, and (in) how it’s affecting me,” Garza said on a recent hot afternoon at his home. He got animated when he talked about his daughter, but he didn’t cry. Neither did he have tearful moments when talking about other family tragedies, like his mother’s death in a car accident on Christmas Day 2017. She was so badly burned, they held a closed-casket funeral. They didn’t have to do that for Amerie Jo, who was shot in the abdomen with a high-velocity rifle bullet. “It’s hard to describe in words. I mean, I’ve had a lot of losses in my life,” Garza said. “Those are all hard but my daughter is just different. “I feel like there’s a certain space that I haven’t been on that’s never gonna be filled again, and I have pieces that are broken within me that are never gonna be fixed,” he said. The death of his girl weighs heavily. He wonders about her being scared in the final moments, and what she thought about as she died.