Fourth-grade teacher Irma Garcia was killed in her Texas classroom on Tuesday.massacred along with his co-teacher and 19 students. Two days later, a family member says her heartbroken husband has died.
The motive for the massacre, the nation’s deadliest school shooting since Newtown, Connecticut, nearly a decade ago, remained under investigation, and authorities said the 18-year-old gunman had no known criminal or mental health history.
The suspected shooter, Salvador Ramos, was inside the classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde for more than an hour before he was killed in a shooting, authorities said Thursday.
The uproar has rocked a country already reeling from gun violence, and the death toll has continued to rise in Uvalde, a majority-Latino city of about 16,000 people about 75 miles (120 kilometers) from the Mexican border.
Joe Garcia, 50, had left flowers at his wife’s funeral on Thursday morning, The New York Times reported. He “practically fell over” after returning home and died of a heart attack, his nephew John Martinez told the newspaper.
The Archdiocese of San Antonio and Rushing-Estes-Knowles Funeral Home confirmed Joe Garcia’s death to The Associated Press. The AP was unable to independently reach members of the Garcia family on Thursday.
Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller will celebrate Mass Thursday night at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Uvalde for the Garcia family and the community at large, the archdiocese said.
Married for 24 years, the couple shared four children. The oldest, Cristian, is serving in the Marine Corps since his brother, José, attended Texas State University. His eldest daughter, Liliana, is a sophomore in high school, while his younger sister is a seventh grader.
Martinez, the Garcias’ nephew, said The Detroit Free Press that the family struggled to understand that while Garcia’s son was training for combat, it was his mother who was shot to death.
“Things like this shouldn’t be happening in schools,” he told the newspaper. “It’s wrong. It’s not right.”
The Garcias loved to barbecue, Irma, 48, wrote in a online letter to your students at Robb Elementary. Irma enjoyed listening to music and taking country cruises to Concan, a community along the Frio River about 25 miles (40.23 kilometers) north of Uvalde.
The school year, scheduled to end Thursday, was Irma’s 23rd year of teaching, all at Robb Elementary School. She had previously been named teacher of the year at the school and she was a 2019 winner of the Trinity Award for Excellence in Education from Trinity University.
“Mrs. Irma Garcia was my mentor when I started teaching,” his colleague Allison McCullough wrote when Irma was named teacher of the year. “The sheer amount of knowledge and patience that she showed me was life changing.”
For five years, Irma had taught alongside Eva Mireles, who was also killed.
“Welcome to fourth grade! We have a wonderful year ahead!” Mireles wrote in an online letter to their incoming students last year.
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Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed.
Reference-apnews.com