Oscar Orona

Oscar Orona
Uvalde, TX

Shortly after Oscar and his wife Jessica left an awards ceremony at Robb Elementary on May 24th, 2022, their son Noah was shot in his classroom.

19 children and 2 teachers were killed.

The fear started when we started getting the messages that there was a shooter at the school.

The last picture we took with Noah after the ceremony was over.

We had been at school that day, we had been with Noah at the award ceremony and his ceremony was over at 11, and we walked with him until it was time to part ways. And he asked, “Can I get home with mom?”

I said to Noah, “It's bubble day. I can't take you with me to work because I need to put you to work and I'm sure you'd rather do the bubbles.”

And he goes, “ok,” and, you know, skipped to his building in the back and I turned around and he waved and that was the last time we saw him as the Noah before all of this.

THE SHOOTING

The last picture of Noah with his two teachers before they were fatally shot hours later.
Ms. Mireles (left) shielded Noah from the gunman.

Jessica called me and said, ”hey, they're telling me that there's a shooter near the school.”

I went to the school and it was mass chaos to say the least. A lady tells me they're going to bus the kids to the high school so I called Jessica and asked her to meet me there.

Then I got back in my truck and left the school not knowing that my son was there, in the classroom with a shooter in there.

I went to the high school and the security guard said, “The school is on lockdown, nobody's coming over here. They're taking them to the local civic center.”

By the time I got to the civic center, there was a huge number of people there looking for their kids, they were asking questions. The city officials, border patrol, police, were trying to get some semblance of organization going. And I guess because I was naive, I thought my son's gonna be on a school bus, he should get off any minute now.

The first bus arrived, but I didn't see Noah. And then another bus comes, no sign of Noah. Two border patrol vans, cargo vans, no Noah. Then finally another bus comes and no Noah. And then we start hearing all these rumors. The teacher is dead, the teacher has been shot. Two teachers are dead. We were walking around at the civic center on the grounds, and we got a call from the hospital.

“Is this a parent of Noah Orona?” And my wife's like, “Yes, this is his mother.” “We need your consent to start treating him.”  “For what? What happened?”  “We can’t tell you but you have to get to the hospital right away.”

So we drove to the new hospital, which had barely been open for two weeks and didn’t have the parking lot situated yet. We had to get through another security point because the hospital was on lockdown also. We go upstairs where they led us to sit by the cafeteria area and we see a lot of our friends, and all of them have these looks of despair. And I don't know if we were just not in touch with reality, but we were just kind of holding each other and saying, ok, let's just wait.

And they kept calling out, “Is the family of so and so here?” “Is the family of so and so,” and it seemed like an eternity before they finally said, “Noah.”

THE HOSPITAL

We meet up with Doctor Guerrero, who happens to be his pediatrician, who tells us: “I've seen Noah, I was told that he had a flesh wound, but he's going to need emergency surgery. You're going to get to see him in a little bit, but you're going to have to go to San Antonio.” 

They called me about 20 or 30 minutes later to go see Noah. He was sitting upright in his bed, had a huge bandage, three or four inch bandaging on the back of his shoulder. And he was just there. And I kissed him on the forehead and I told him that I loved him and that he was the bravest little guy that I knew.

Noah kind of pulled me in and he goes, “Dad, my clothes are ruined.”
I said, “Don't worry about it. We'll replace your clothes.”
And then I got up and he goes, “Dad, I also lost my new glasses.”
And I was like, “Oh my God, don't worry about it.”

Finally his helicopter got there and they let me go as far as the exit room.

We made a 90-minute trip in about 40 minutes. We missed Noah before he got into surgery, the nurse told us it should be about 30 to 45 minutes. 10 minutes into them starting, they called us back: “It's going to take a little bit longer because it's not a flesh wound. He has suffered a gunshot wound to the lower back that exited through his shoulder and he's pretty torn up. He's going to be ok, but it's going to require some work and he may need a skin graft or two.”

That was probably the most horrifying, harrowing experience that we've been through as parents. Not knowing and then realizing that we were..were we being ignorant? Or were we just– what was wrong with us? We weren't worried. I just assumed he was going to get off one of the buses [at the civic center]. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that something had happened to my son.

NOAH’S INJURIES

Noah was shot in the lower back and the exit wound tore through his shoulder and exited right above his shoulder blade. It tore a path-- a little bit more than a foot of just destruction. The surgery was on his mid-back. They sutured the bullet hole and that wound healed faster than the exit wound because those things are just designed to cause all kinds of damage. But he just was lucky at the position he was shot at, I guess he was at an angle. It caused most of the damage externally on his shoulder as opposed to going into his body or, you know, organs or anything like that.

He has a kind of river-like scar that's deep and deeply embedded into his shoulder where it came out. But the doctor said he may grow, and they may just scab or he may have that the rest of his life. It’s one of those things where, you know, he's very sensitive to the touch and that doesn’t mean it hurts - it's just that for him psychologically, it's like… he always flinches. When people come up to him, some of them forget and they come up and either pat him on the back or whatever, and he kind of flinches, they don't notice that. But I see him flinching. It's just something he does because it's just, I don't know if it's ingrained in him or it's just some kind of emotional response that he does to deal with that.

The scar itself is just a daily reminder of everything. For him it's a constant reminder. My oldest daughter cannot look at it without breaking into tears. It's a constant reminder of what he went through. The real trooper in all this was my wife because she took him to every physical therapy, she was there, she saw everything that they put him through. It wasn't easy. He’s done with physical therapy for now based on what he's been able to accomplish, but there's a lot of times where he's worried about, is [my shoulder] going to hold up? Am I going to be able to do this? He's slowly working his way back, but I think a lot of the damage is more emotional and psychological than physical. Of course, it's easier said than done for me because I didn't go through that. Maybe he does have something, he just keeps everything inside, you know what I mean? He doesn't want to say anything, he just keeps it inside.

NOAH’S AFTERMATH

Initially, we felt guilty because Jessica and I were always on the other side of this. Whenever someone needed help, we would take them food, take up some groceries, we were always asking what can we do to help? And initially that night [while we were in San Antonio], we felt bad because we weren't there in Uvalde to be with these poor people who were finding out hours later that their kids basically had been shot and killed, and not only that, but basically dismembered beyond belief. You know what I mean? And we felt guilty that we weren't able to be there for some of them that we knew really well. We felt relief that our son has survived. We felt that there was a guardian angel there covering him, watching over him. Whatever emotion that you can imagine a parent would go through after going through something like that, we probably went through it tenfold.

We were worried about Noah’s psychological well-being. We were worried about the physical part of it because we had no idea until after the surgery, until the doctor showed us a picture, of the devastation that he had endured. And then we kept thinking, he was in there, in this condition, bloody clothes and all, for 77 minutes. And there was 300 some odd police officers, law enforcement officials out there just chit chatting, basically trying to see what was going to happen next, while my son lay there, bleeding. He could have bled to death. It’s nothing short of a miracle that he survived.

The biggest change that we started seeing was Noah before the shooting and then this new young man after the shooting. And I say young man because he stopped being a kid.

He lost his innocence in that classroom.

We have an entirely different person now, and I guess that's what worries me sometimes. Is how to, I mean, how do we move forward and tell him everything is going to be ok with more shootings basically on a regular basis? We feel powerless sometimes-- that we can't do enough.

Survivors are not lucky, as so many people like to use that term “Lucky.” You know what I mean? I mean, we like to think that we were blessed that our son was able to survive. But the life that we live now is, I mean, basically, we're a group of three everywhere we go because we just, we can't leave him. He has separation issues and things like that.

And we’re still trying to know this new person who has separation issues, who we have to let know where we're at all the times in the house. A couple of weeks ago, I went outside without letting him know. I always tell him if I’m going to be outside, I'm going to be in the front yard, I'm going to be in the backyard, or going to check the mail or whatever, and I made the mistake of going outside, and he came out, and he said, “Where were you? I was looking for you. You didn't tell me where you were going.”.

Sometimes people will say, “He's so quiet, and he's so shy.”  And it's not that he's so quiet. He wasn't quiet before, and he wasn't shy before. But the new version of him, it'll take him a while. It has to be somebody who he feels really comfortable with for him to really come out of his shell. Otherwise, he's just kind of there, you know. It's difficult to watch him because it increases my level of just worrying about how is he going to make it once he's out there?

OSCAR’S AFTERMATH

Before [the shooting], I'd say I was probably carefree. My age was not a factor. In fact, I didn't feel old. I didn't think I was old. I wasn't so aware of my surroundings; I wasn't vigilant at all, basically. I mean, aside from the normal stuff, but I really wasn't, you know, it was just normal.

And now, age is something I think about every day when I wake up. We're very vigilant every time we go out. My wife and I are always looking to see where we sit, where the exits are, you know, is the table bolted down or is it not? Do we have to flip it over? We don’t let Noah out of our sight for nothing. We're just, I mean, not that we let him roam before. But it's just, we just feel like there's people out there that are like…”The shooter didn't finish the job, and someday, somehow, I'm going to do it.”

We've been so focused on Noah. We've talked about how we need to go see someone-- either as a couple or individually but doing the Noah thing is a full-time– I'm not going to call it a job because it's not a job– but it just consumes us. We’ve been seriously talking about it for the last couple of months, and in our time frame, hopefully, in the next few months, we'll go see someone—we’ll talk to someone, and share some of the stuff that we worry about, share our concerns with someone other than each other. But, like I said, Noah takes up a lot of our time. We knew that our lives were never going to be the same again.

I'm trying to take care of myself. So that I can get to, I mean, my goal is I want to see him graduate from high school, and then after that, I'll set a new goal, but I don't wanna be greedy either.

You know what I mean? I just want to take it one day at a time because pretty much that's how we live our lives. You know, there's one day at a time, and we don't really make, we talk about stuff, but we don't really plan stuff because we don't know what's going to happen.

THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

There's a lot of things that run through my mind that worry me. Main one is that I'm not gonna be in my forties or fifties when he's 18 or 19 and say, “Son, you know what, I'm working. Don't worry about it. We've got this.” If I'm not in that position, I wanna make sure that he does not have to worry about anything. And I don't want my wife to be in that position. She's 8 years younger than me, so, you know, she'll still be viable, not that I won't be viable. Hopefully. I don't want her burdened by that either. So, for me that's something that consumes me on a daily basis. What can we do, what can I do to make sure that, you know, he's taken care of.

We were always trying to plan for his college and make sure that we'd be able to send him to college. Now, he still does well in school and I'm not saying he's not going to college, but I don't know because there's so many things that are going on. There's things that he's gonna be experiencing as he gets older and comes to terms of what he's been through that I just don't know if that's gonna be his path.

And beforehand, it was like, well, you know, we’ve got to work hard to make sure we get you into a good college and all this and that. But now it's like we just want you to survive.

Ideally he'll go off to college and have a career. But my concern is that as he gets older he's really going to have to start dealing with some of the things that probably right now, he's, he's just putting aside.

He sees, someone [therapist] here that was, she's a friend of the family, but she's also a counselor, but she was highly recommended by the FBI forensics experts that got to know them once they were doing all these interviews. So we decided to stay with her and they're doing really well. He's going to be going just twice a month because she says as far as what we can do right now, we're just going to have to wait and see as he gets older to see what happens.

MEMORIES

2021

We have our moments, we see our memories on Facebook, but they always come back to how we wouldn’t have known that two years later, four years later, our son was going to go through this.

It’s just an everyday occurrence that we cannot help but think that, you know, this happened last year and… the year before, in 2021, things were so different. And then we think, “Wow, the time frame a year later, who would have known that he was going to go through all of this?” And it's unfortunate but that's what our lives are now.

That’s kind of a measuring point for us. I don't think that's healthy but that's where we're at.

This process has aged us, in terms of what we've been through, what we've experienced, what we've seen, and granted, we still haven't seen a lot. Because everything's being held up and everything, and we don't really wanna see it, but, you know, it may come to light. I don't know, but we just want people to realize that even though our son survived, he still has a lot of things that he's got to get through. A year, two years, three years, there's, I mean, there's just no telling what can happen, what's going to happen.

We don't know what's going to happen. All we know is what we want for him, and one of my worst fears is that he won't be able to function as an adult because of everything that he's been through.

UVALDE ONE YEAR LATER

After the one-year anniversary, we had a vigil here. The city– they didn't want anybody at the plaza where they have the memorials and they closed down a lot of streets and basically made it difficult for people that wanted to come and look around, not be able to do that. Because they're trying to minimize that, those people that are coming that are wanting to see what happened and stuff like that.  I mean, it's all over the area. I'm sure you're very familiar with the murals and the plaza and everything and I, I think that the city should rename the plaza, in some sort of fashion, to honor those victims.

But the city just basically wants to remove everything, get it out of the way and get our plaza back.

The tide is turning locally, they want us to sweep everything under the rug, make all of this go away. “Stop complaining about the police, stop complaining about this, and stop complaining about the treatment. We get it. Let's just move on, let's move forward.”

In fact, they named their foundation the Moving Forward Foundation, Moving Forward Foundation for the new school, which I thought was a slap in the face to all the deceased. But a lot of that is because of all the pending litigation. Of course, they can't believe that people are moving forward with legal action. 

There's things that people don't know about [Noah’s experience]. We don't say, “Hey, look at us” or, “My son's having this.” We just rather keep it to ourselves because there's a stigma attached to being a survivor. And then this town is ready to move on from this. Like, let's just sweep it under the rug as they say, and let's just kind of try to move on. But what they don't realize is that no matter what they do, we're still going to be remembered as a city that had this massive deadly shooting for probably the rest of everyone's lives.

LOOKS CAN BE DECEIVING

What I would like for [people] to know is that looks can be deceiving.

They see Noah, they see a picture and they see how big he is, but he's not the same Noah as he was before. He's entirely different. I wanna say he's still my little boy, but in many respects, he's not my little boy now. He's my little man now because he's been through some experiences that, you know, it just changed him. And he’s not the same.

My son is going through a growth spurt. So he's grown, like I wanna say at least five inches. And most people see him and they're like, oh, he's healthy. He's, you know, this and that, but they don't understand. He's in tennis camp, what they don't see is, and I had to tell the coaches, “Hey, just give me a heads up. He may or may not be able to do everything, but he wants to try.”

Two months after the shooting Noah started experiencing some discomfort in his right arm and it felt kind of odd to the touch. And, I thought, well, let’s take him to the emergency room.

On the x-ray you could see two pieces of shrapnel floating. I mean, we knew he had some in his back. The doctor said it was very minor and they got mostly everything, but that what they couldn't reach was the shrapnel that had gone into his arm and his rib cage. After we saw the
x-ray they contacted his surgeon, and he said they'll either eventually just kind of go away on their own, or they'll find a spot [in Noah’s body] to try to get out. And that's what that was. 

He said, you know, we could theoretically go in there and try to fish it out, but we may cause more damage by doing that than letting it just take its course. And unless it's a level eight or nine kind of pain level, then it's best we just let it take its course. So he said he was fine with [leaving bullet fragments in], and just giving Noah your basic over the counter pain medication. But he still has some floating around and they could, that could happen again

We’re doing everything we can to normalize his life. We know we will never be normal again, that we know. But some semblance of normalcy would be nice. You know what I mean?

People take a lot of things for granted right now with their kids, and we always tell them, don't ever take kids for granted, don't ever take anything for granted because in one swift minute, things will change and can change and for us they did.

ABOUT NOAH’S WRISTBANDS

“When I see people wearing my bracelets, it makes me feel like I’m supported and that people care about me.” - Noah

As a thank you for donations, Noah and family sent out wristbands with his name on them. Many people choose to take pictures with their wristband and send it back to Noah for his photo album. Recently the wristband made it to MT EVEREST!

WORDS FROM OSCAR:

None of this, in our wildest imagination, did we ever think the donations would get to this point. We're thankful because our goal, like I've told everybody, our goal is for Noah to be financially viable as an independent person. We want him to have a financial portfolio that will allow him to be independent, you know, and that's what our goal is. I've altered my retirement plans to make sure that we can continue to do that, and so has my wife, so that's what we're both geared towards doing.

I mean, for us, we're working right now as hard as we ever have to make sure that once he gets to that age where he's going to be on his own, that he can be on his own, you know?

As soon as we receive a donation, we get an email and they come in all forms of, you know, $5, $10, and it's nice because some of the notes that we get are so heartwarming. So I make it a point to answer each and every one of them. I provide a thank you to each and every one of the people who donate because I think it's vitally important. So whether it's, you know, a $200 gift or it's a $5 gift, they both get the same amount of attention.

We have a bracelet album. Everybody who’s taken the time to ask for one of Noah’s bracelets and that we've sent them to, they send us a picture and then we put it on our Facebook and say thank you for supporting us.