The school district has come under fire for Contracts renovation for several employees and administrators who were accused of mishandling communications with parents on the day of the shooting. Parents have also complained of being silenced during heated school board meetings and being banned of school district property.
Although several parents sued the school district and police over how they handled the shooting, including waiting 77 minutes before entering the two classrooms where the gunman was hiding and firing a high-powered rifle, Reyes chose not to. He said that suing would not benefit his recovery.
Instead, he and more than a dozen other plaintiffs filed a civil claim against the deceased shooter, his family, and the companies that manufactured the security and communications equipment used in the response.
“They should have protected the school a long time ago before it happened,” Reyes said of district officials. «I don’t think they will change, unfortunately.»
He is seeking at least $1 million in damages, which could increase as he racks up more medical bills, his attorney, Mark DiCarlo, said.
Reyes has undergone 11 operations since the riot in Uvalde, about 80 miles west of San Antonio. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed, unleashing an outpouring of pain, anger and lingering questions in the tight-knit community.
As law enforcement officers waited in the hallway for more than an hour for a better-equipped Border Patrol SWAT team to arrive, Reyes lay on his classroom floor surrounded by dead and dying children.
He wondered when help would arrive and hoped that at least some of the students he told to play dead would survive. None did.
Reyes was shot multiple times in the arm, the back, and a lung. A titanium rod connects his elbow to his wrist, where he broke the bone. Sleep eludes him. Most days, the only interaction he has with people is during one of his many medical appointments.
Reyes, who lives alone with his Chihuahua, has spent most of the year isolated from the larger community, rarely leaving his home and only occasionally allowing close friends and family to visit, he said. He buys groceries early in the morning before customers, with their sidelong glances and low whispers, fill the aisles. He said that he hates being gossiped about and that he has steered clear of media interviews in recent months.
Locked up in his house, Reyes wonders if he could have done anything differently that horrible day. He has replayed the afternoon countless times in his mind, sometimes breaking into sobs and crying himself out.
“I try to keep myself busy with small projects, I just try to change my mind to think about the happy times I had with them: how they acted, how they talked,” Reyes said. «Sometimes he beats me. I sob and try to let it out.”
The feeling he can’t shake, he said, is one of abandonment, by responding law enforcement officers who waited more than 70 minutes to take down the shooter and then by the school district that was absent during his recovery.
“I thought they would have been more loving, more compassionate,” he said. “I feel like I never worked for them, like I was nobody. I am nobody to them.»
His fear keeps him mostly confined to his home, and he wonders if someone would come to his rescue if he were in a car accident or had a medical emergency. He is ambivalent about going back to work in a school district that has barred angry parents from attending board meetings and seemingly offers few resources to survivors.
Reyes said his only comfort is knowing that he is a champion for his students and others at Robb Elementary.
“I have to be a voice for my 11 students,” he said. “But I mean all of them. We have to be a voice for them.”