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| Relatives of Rafael Pereira da Silva, one of the victims of Thursday’s shooting at Tasso da Silveira school, grieve during the funeral at Realengo cemetery in Rio de Janeiro yesterday |
Just 24 hours after the ghastly attack by a suicidal former student, thousands filed into the Morundu cemetery near the Rio suburb of Realengo, where the attack occurred, to lay the first children to rest.
Relatives, supported by friends and other family, wailed and rocked during a ceremony at the cemetery where ambulances and fire trucks stood by, following a tragedy that has plunged South America’s largest nation into grief.
A young girl in a pink Minnie Mouse t-shirt clutched a single rose to her chest as she attended a funeral at Morundu.
A military police helicopter flew overhead during the funeral of 13-year-old Laryssa Silva, and mourners gasped and wept when they looked up to see rose petals cascading down from the aircraft.
Laryssa was one of 10 girls, along with two boys, shot execution style by 23-year-old Wellington Menezes de Oliveira, who returned to his former school to unleash a terrifying slaughter.
On Thursday police put the shooter’s age at 24.
“This miserable man destroyed our family,” cried out Jackson da Silva, Laryssa’s godfather.
“He had no heart. What he did was horrific,” he told reporters at the cemetery.
Those attending the funerals included police, politicians, and medical personnel who tended to Thursday’s wounded and dying. Doctors in white smocks stood at attention, their stethoscopes around their necks.
On Thursday, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who took office in January, could not hold back the tears as she shared her grief with a nation struggling to comprehend the tragedy.
“This (crime) is not representative of the country. Innocent children lost their lives and their future,” she said.
Her voice cracked as she asked people to stand for a minute’s silence, “so that we may pay our respects to these little Brazilians whose lives were taken away prematurely.”
Rousseff, who travels to China this weekend, had no plans yet to travel to Rio for the funerals, the president’s office said.
By yesterday, 11 of the 12 dead had been identified by relatives. Eleven youths remain hospitalised, some with serious injuries.
With each passing hour, details emerged of the attack by the troubled shooter, who only stopped firing when he himself was shot in the leg by a police officer and then turned one of his two revolvers on himself, officials said.
A rambling, religiously themed suicide note was found in his clothes but it shed little light on the motivation of his macabre attack on defenceless children, aged between nine and 15, at the start of morning classes at the Tasso da Silveira public school.