Texas victims: from smiling Pakistani exchange student to substitute teacher with two jobs
Friday’s massacre in the rural community of Santa Fe left 10 dead and wounded 13 more, including a school police officer who is in critical condition
Among the fatalities at Santa Fe High School were a Pakistani exchange student and a substitute teacher trying to make ends meet for her family. Here are brief profiles of some of the victims:
Sabika Sheikh
A 17-year-old Pakistani with a bright smile, Sheikh was proud to be studying in the United States as an exchange student. The experience was organised through YES, a programme funded by the US State Department, according to a Facebook post by the Pakistan Association of Greater Houston.
Cynthia Tisdale
Tisdale was a substitute teacher at Santa Fe High School. She took on a second job as a server at a local restaurant after she became her family’s sole income earner when her husband was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease, her brother-in-law John Tisdale posted on Facebook. The Tisdales have four children.
Christian Riley Garcia
Garcia was remembered on Facebook by the Crosby Church pastor who baptised him years earlier. A photograph of Garcia, 15, taken just days before the shooting, shows him wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap and a slight smile that reveals braces on his teeth.
“Here is Riley about 10 days ago writing scripture on the door frame of what was to be his new bedroom,” Pastor Keenan Smith wrote. “Riley you are greatly loved and greatly missed.”
Kimberly Vaughan
After a desperate search for her missing daughter, US Army veteran Rhonda Hart posted to Facebook that Vaughan had been shot dead in her first-period art class.