Parents of Uvalde school shooting victim celebrate daughter's birthday
UVALDE (CBSNewsTexas.com) – Amerie Jo Garza's family marked her daughter's birthday this year with a visit to her memorial in Uvalde's downtown plaza. This is the first year they are forced to celebrate her life without her.
"To honor her. I don't want anyone to ever forget," said her mother, Kimberly Garcia.
She brought a bouquet of balloons and her daughter's favorite drink – a Starbucks' vanilla bean Frappuccino. Family and close friends posed for pictures and sang, "Happy Birthday."
This time last year, they remember eating cake covered, at Amerie's request, with sea shells.
With the good memories, though, come the hard ones.
It was two weeks after turning ten last year, Amerie was murdered in her classroom at Robb Elementary School, denying her the chance to ever reach 11.
"It's going to be a very hard month. It's her birthday. It's Mother's Day. It's the… I don't like to say anniversary… I call it the one year mark," said Garcia.
Every time there's another mass shooting, this family says their wounds re-open, particularly in cases like this weekend in Allen, where children are victims.
"It brings back bad memories and trauma and we have to relive stuff like that, you know. Every single time."
The family was in Austin this week fighting for legislation to raise the legal age to buy assault rifle-style weapons to 21. HB2741 passed through committee Monday, only to fail… when it wasn't scheduled for a vote in time.
"You work so hard and you fight so hard for one little thing," said Garcia.
She says, though, she'll never stop fighting, not if it means keeping just one family from feeling this pain.
"It happens so much, it happens so often that you don't it's going to happen to you. And that's what I always thought. I never ever imagined in my life this happening and it did. It did," she said.