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The failed river crossing that took place at this spot over several days in early May was one of the most lethal engagements of the war for the Russian army. Its forces had sought to surround Ukrainian soldiers in the nearby town of Sievierodonetsk — but instead became surrounded themselves, boxed in by the river and a Ukrainian frontline. At least 400 Russian soldiers died, mostly from artillery attacks.

As the war grinds across the rolling plains and forests of Eastern Ukraine, the maneuvering of troops has in large part evolved into attempts at entrapment. But as the deadly encounter at the bridge illustrated, the tactic comes with grave risks.

After failing to capture major cities such as Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, or to cleave off the entire Black Sea coast, the Russian military attempted a major encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the east. That effort is looking difficult now that Ukraine has blocked one main route of advance, near the town of Izium.

So the Russian forces’ immediate goal has become a smaller encirclement of Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost city in the Donbas region still under Ukrainian control. Artillery bombardments by Russian troops approaching from three sides have ravaged the city, knocking out water and electricity and in the past day killing at least six people.

The Russian strategy has been to use the blunt instrument of its army’s vast artillery to pound away at Ukrainian forces, making incremental gains in the Luhansk region of the Donbas. Military analysts and Western intelligence officials believe that Moscow’s forces would face brutal urban combat if they tried to fully capture Sievierodonetsk, and that they would struggle to mount an offensive deeper inside Ukraine.

Encirclement is a harrowing prospect for soldiers.

“I try not to think about it,” said Pvt. Ivan Sichkar, a Ukrainian soldier surveying the destruction of the encircled Russian force. “If I think of being surrounded, there’s no time left to do anything else.”

The Russians’ refashioned goal has focused the battle on a slender, 75-mile front in the Donbas. It is seeking to advance from both the north and the south to close the one remaining supply line for Ukraine into the city of Sievierodonetsk.

On Tuesday, the Russian army advanced from the south, forcing Ukrainian troops to retreat from the small town of Svitlodarsk, lest the Russians envelop the town and trap soldiers inside. And in its Wednesday evening briefing, the Ukrainian general staff described stepped-up attacks by Russian helicopters and jets to support ground troops in the east.

With Russia making only halting progress in Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin moved Wednesday to shore up support at home, announcing raises in pensions and the minimum wage and making his first trip to meet with wounded soldiers. “They are all heroes,” he said at a military hospital.

Mr. Putin also signed a decree opening a fast track to Russian citizenship for Ukrainian residents of areas controlled by the Russian military, a further step toward annexing territory in southeastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied.

As Mr. Putin moved to reassure ordinary Russians, Ukraine’s Western allies were trying to maintain pressure on his government. In Ankara on Wednesday, talks took place between Turkey, Finland and Sweden over Turkish concerns about the two Nordic countries’ application to join NATO. At a news conference after five hours of negotiations, Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said more talks were needed.

“Turkey is not under time pressure,” Mr. Kalin said. “It is not possible for any process to proceed without meeting the security concerns of Turkey.”

The strategy of encirclement has yielded far-reaching political gains for Russia over the course of its longer conflict in the region, in which Russian-backed separatists battled Ukrainian forces for eight years before the full-scale invasion this year. Two cease-fires, known as the Minsk agreements and seen as struck on terms advantageous to Russia, followed successful Russian encirclements of Ukrainian troops in the east in 2014 and 2015.

But in Bilohorivka, a tiny coal mining town on the banks of the Siversky Donets River, the tables were turned earlier this month, at least temporarily slowing the Russian advance.

Ukrainian soldiers who fought in the battle took to calling the site “the ear” for a lobe-like loop in the river where the fiercest fighting took place. The Ukrainian military escorted reporters for The New York Times to the site, which is on a frontline formed in much of the Donbas region by the roiling, fast-flowing river, swollen by spring rain.

Sunlight filters through the foliage of a dense, quiet forest on the river’s floodplain, which was the Ukrainians’ kill zone. Mosquitoes buzz. In places, the smell of decaying corpses is overwhelming.

“The Russian bodies start here,” Private Sichkar said as he rounded a bend in a dirt road extending about mile through the forest to the river’s edge. Just in this one spot, 15 incinerated armored personnel carriers were scattered about.

“The Russians wanted some little victory,” Col. Dmytro Kashchenko, the Ukrainian officer who commanded the counterattack on the pontoon bridge, said in an interview. “They tried in Kyiv, they tried in Kharkiv, and they lost. They were trying to win at least something.”

The Siversky Donets River, which cuts a meandering path through eastern Ukraine, forms a natural barrier to Russia’s advances. Suitable sites for pontoon crossings are few, Colonel Kashchenko said.

He was ordered to one of the crossings on May 8, after the Russians deployed pontoons and moved soldiers into the forest on the near bank. Ukrainian infantry advanced into the area the next day, but were repulsed, suffering losses, he said.

They then set up a defensive line to box in the Russians as they crossed their pontoon bridge, and rained down artillery fire on the area. They also set about destroying the bridge by placing floating mines upstream, allowing the current to carry them to the Russians’ pontoons, which proved an effective tactic. The Ukrainian forces blew up four separate bridges at the crossing site.

The Russians hastily laid new pontoons and sent armored vehicles across, Colonel Kashchenko said, but they were unable to break through the Ukrainian defensive line. Dozens of armored vehicles and infantry soldiers became trapped and were mauled by Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainians also hit Russian troops involved in the bridge work on the far shore.

The bombardment included some of the first barrages from a newly arrived American artillery gun, the M777, Colonel Kashchenko said.

Colonel Kashchenko said he had offered the enemy forces a chance to surrender, shouting into a loudspeaker, “‘Russians, give up!’” But, he said, “I don’t know if they heard us.”

Some enemy soldiers escaped by swimming across the river, the Ukrainians said. The Ukrainians have yet to collect the remains of the Russians scattered around the forest.

In the mottled light sifting through the leaves, discarded food and personal items lay all about: a sleeping bag, bottles of shower gel, cans of beef, a bag of potatoes, Russian tea bags, flip-flop sandals.

Ukrainian soldiers found a certificate for a medal granted to a Russian colonel for earlier fighting in the war. It was called an “award for military excellence.”

Beside a disabled Russian tank lay a cardboard box apparently used for carrying supplies. On the box was an odd message for a unit in war: “Always believe something wonderful is about to happen.”

Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, former supreme allied commander in Europe, drew a distinction between the Ukrainian tactics of seeking to target Russian armored vehicles and troops with artillery and the Russian bombardments of towns and cities.

“In the big scheme of things, Ukraine is trying to do maneuver warfare to regain territory and cut off resupply routes,” General Breedlove said. “And Russia is doing more of a grinding, attrition-based warfare.”

Of Russia’s bungled pontoon crossing, he said, “the Russians did something poorly that is difficult even if you do it magnificently.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.

It was not known how many were killed in the first minutes of the massacre, which was the deadliest in an American school since 20 children and six educators were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. But officials said that the officers had successfully contained the gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, until more specially trained officers could arrive.

Yet even as the details of the attack became more clear, the motivation behind the eruption of violence remained frustratingly opaque. In the absence of an explanation, there was only deep grief in a community unaccustomed to outside attention, and a raw renewal of the national debate over firearms legislation and the stupefying tally of gun violence in America.

By Wednesday, all of the victims had been identified by the officials, who had yet to release their names, but the toll of the tragedy was only beginning to take shape.

All 21 fatalities occurred in a single area of the school, the authorities said. They included Eva Mireles, a teacher who ran marathons in her free time, and Jailah Silguero, 10, the youngest of four children. “I can’t believe this happened to my daughter,” said her father, Jacob Silguero, crying during an interview. “It’s always been a fear of mine to lose a kid.”

President Biden said he would travel to Uvalde in the coming days to try to comfort the residents. He did not call on Congress to take up gun safety legislation but in remarks on Wednesday said that the “Second Amendment is not absolute” and that previous gun safety laws did not violate its constitutional protections. “These actions we’ve taken before, they save lives,” he said. “They can do it again.”

Still, with little apparent opening at the federal level, states controlled by Democrats moved to introduce their own changes. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would work to raise to 21 — “at a minimum” — the age for buying AR-15-style weapons like the one the Texas gunman used. In California, the State Senate advanced a bill along party lines, proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and modeled on Texas’ restrictive abortion law, that would let private citizens sue those who make or sell outlawed ghost guns, ghost gun kits and assault-style weapons.

“This state is leaning in,” Mr. Newsom said. “We’re leaning forward.”

In Uvalde, top Texas officials gathered for an emotional news conference that began with calls for unity in the aftermath of the killing. “It is intolerable and unacceptable to have in this state anybody who would kill little kids in our schools,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, who has celebrated the loosening of gun regulations in Texas and pushed for a new law last year that allows most Texans to carry a gun without a permit.

But the somber tone that Mr. Abbott sought to strike was upended by Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat challenging Mr. Abbott’s re-election, who blamed the governor for the repeated carnage in the state. “The time to stop the next shooting is right now and you are doing nothing,” Mr. O’Rourke said.

“Sit down, you’re out of line and an embarrassment,” the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, responded.

The interruption and resulting vitriol from the stage, filled almost entirely with Republican officials, revealed in an instant the entrenched battle lines over gun ownership and mass killing in the United States.

“I hate to say this but there are more people who are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas,” Mr. Abbott said later. He criticized “people who think that, well, ‘Maybe we just implement tougher gun laws — it’s going to solve it,’” saying that “Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois responded later by pointing to evidence that “the majority of guns used in Chicago shootings come from states with lax gun laws.”

Mr. Patrick said limiting entrances to just one at smaller schools could be a solution to keeping students safe. He also suggested arming teachers. Mr. Abbott stressed the need for better mental health care, though he did not propose how to improve access to it in the state.

Yet in the case of Mr. Ramos, there was little to raise official alarm ahead of the shooting, officials said. No history of mental illness. No apparent criminal record. “We don’t see a motive or catalyst right now,” said Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

But those who knew the gunman said he had been slipping away: He appeared to have dropped out of high school and often frightened co-workers at a fast-food restaurant where he worked. When picked on, he would lash out in response. Acquaintances said he frequently missed class and had few friends.

“He would curse at the customers, at the managers, even at me,” said Jocelyn Rodriguez, 19, an employee at the Wendy’s restaurant. She recalled that he once told her, “I’m going to shoot up the Wendy’s,” but she never took his threats seriously. “I thought he was joking.”

Two weeks ago, she said, he stopped showing up to work.

He purchased an AR-style rifle at a local retailer on May 17, a day after his 18th birthday. Then he bought another one on May 20, officials said. In between, he bought 375 rounds of ammunition.

He had been messaging obliquely about his plans with a 15-year-old girl in Germany who he had recently met online. The girl, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, Cece, said he had video-called her in the days around his birthday from a gun store, where he told her he was buying a rifle. Mr. Ramos also showed her, on the video call, a black bag that appeared to hold many magazines of ammunition and at least one gun.

On Tuesday morning, parents dropped their children off at Robb Elementary, a cheerful brick schoolhouse near the edge of Uvalde where everyone was preparing for summer break.

Narcedalia Luna and her 8-year-old grandson, a third grader, attended an end-of-the-year awards program in the school’s cafeteria. But her grandson told her that he wanted to go home early. So they did. “I gave in and I’m glad I did,” she said.

They returned to their home on Diaz Street.

Along that same short street, less than half a mile from the school, Mr. Ramos lived in a modest home with his grandmother. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Ramos texted the girl in Germany just after 11 a.m., apparently annoyed that his grandmother was calling AT&T about his cellphone. “Ima do something to her rn,” he wrote. The screenshots do not show Cece replying, but at 11:21 a.m., Mr. Ramos sent another text: “I just shot my grandma in her head,” followed immediately by another: “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.”

Mr. Ramos, officials said, had picked up one of the weapons he had bought, and shot his 66-year-old grandmother in the face.

The injured woman rushed to a neighbor’s house for help while Mr. Ramos sped off in her pickup truck, bringing with him a bag of ammunition and the two weapons. Ms. Luna said another neighbor spotted the grandmother with “blood on her face running across the street.”

The truck Mr. Ramos was driving, officials said, crashed at high speed next to the school at roughly 11:30 a.m.

As he approached the school, officials said, he encountered an Uvalde school district officer. There were conflicting reports, state police officials said, as to whether there was an exchange of gunfire at that point.

As the gunman approached, Juan Paulo Ybarra Jr. said, his little sister, a 10-year-old student at Robb Elementary, had been inside her fourth-grade class, watching a movie. He said she looked out of the classroom window and saw a man outside with a gun, then alerted her teacher. Soon the classroom could hear gunfire aimed toward nearby windows, she told him.

Mr. Ybarra said his sister described how she and her fellow classmates jumped out of the window, one by one, and ran to a funeral home across the street, seeking refuge.

The gunman entered the school. After he was inside, two officers from the Uvalde Police Department arrived, engaged the gunman and were immediately met with gunfire, officials said. Both were shot.

Soon, scores of police officers responded to the scene, but the gunman had barricaded himself inside what Mr. Abbott described as internally connected classrooms. It would take a tactical team, including specialized Border Patrol agents, to finally breach the room.

As they entered, one of the agents held up a shield so the other agents could file in behind, an official briefed on the investigation said. Three of the agents fired their weapons once they were in the room, striking the gunman several times and killing him shortly after 1 p.m.

In Uvalde, which lies in a rural area near the Mexican border dotted with desert willows and bigtooth maples, there are so few places to host large events that the governor’s news conference took place in the same high school the gunman had attended.

Classes were supposed to let out on Thursday for the summer. Instead the year ended early as parents were faced with the unthinkable, waiting for hours on Tuesday for the dreaded confirmation about the fate of their children, some having provided DNA swabs to prove their relationship.

“They were beautiful, innocent children,” said George Rodriguez, who had ties to two children killed in a shooting: a niece and a 10-year-old boy, Jose Flores, who he said had been like a grandson. Mr. Rodriguez said a counseling session at the local civic center had offered little relief from the pain of losing the boy whose photo he kept in his wallet, “my little Josécito.”

Reporting was contributed by James Dobbins, Jesus Jiménez, Michael Levenson, David Montgomery, Josh Peck, Frances Robles, Edgar Sandoval, Michael D. Shear, Eileen Sullivan and Glenn Thrush. Susan C. Beachy, Jack Begg and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

On Tuesday, he and his family had gathered to process the news from the authorities: Ms. Garcia had been among the 21 people killed — 19 students and two teachers — at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

When the authorities went inside the classroom moments after the shooting, Mr. Martinez said, they had “found her body there, embracing children in her arms pretty much until her last breath.”

She had treated her students as if they were her own children, he said, so it had been easy for loved ones to possibly “picture her putting her life on the line.”

Ms. Garcia — or Tia Garcia, as Mr. Martinez referred to his aunt in Spanish — was “like a second mom” to her nephews and students, he said.

“She brings a joy and a light to the room.”

‘They just want their sister back’

Jailah Silguero, 10, was the youngest of four children, the “baby” of her family, her father said. She loved going to school and seeing her friends. Jailah had told her father, Jacob Silguero, 35, on Monday night that she wanted to stay home on Tuesday. It was uncharacteristic of her, and by morning, Mr. Silguero said, she seemed to have forgotten about it. She got dressed and went to school as usual.

“I can’t believe this happened to my daughter, my baby,” he said.

He added, “It’s always been a fear of mine to lose a kid.”

Mr. Silguero and the family were getting ready to go to a funeral home on Wednesday after having spent hours at the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center the day before waiting for information about Jailah. Officials asked the family to give a DNA sample using a swab.

“I figured after the DNA swab test, it was something bad,” he said. “About an hour later, they called to confirm that she had passed.”

Jailah’s siblings are taking it hard, Mr. Silguero said: “They just want their sister back.”

Jailah Silguero was among 21 people — 19 children and two adults — killed in the massacre on Tuesday.

Two cousins in one class

Jackie Cazares and Annabelle Rodriguez were cousins in the same classroom at Robb Elementary School. Jackie, who had her First Communion two weeks ago, was the social one, said Polly Flores, who was Jackie’s aunt and Annabelle’s great-aunt. “She was outgoing; she always had to be the center of attention,” Ms. Flores said. “She was my little diva.”

Annabelle, an honor roll student, was quieter. But she and her cousin were close, so close that Annabelle’s twin sister, who was home-schooled, “was always jealous,” Ms. Flores said. “We are a very tight family,” she said. “It’s just devastating.”

A little girl who loved her friends

Amerie Jo Garza was a friendly 10-year-old who loved Play-Doh.

Amerie Jo was “full of life, a jokester, always smiling,” her father, Alfred Garza III, said in a brief phone interview. She did not talk a lot about school but liked spending time with her friends at lunch, in the playground and during recess. “She was very social,” he said. “She talked to everybody.”

Amerie Jo’s extended family had gathered in the room when the Texas Rangers broke the horrible news late Tuesday.

The family’s loss came after losing several loved ones to Covid-19 over the past two years.

“We were finally getting a break, nobody was passing away,” Mr. Garza said. “Then this happened.”

Mr. Garza, who works at a used car dealership in Uvalde, said he was on a lunch break when Amerie Jo’s mother told him she could not get their daughter out of the school because it was on lockdown.

“I just went straight over there and found the chaos,” he said. He recalled seeing cars backing up on the streets, with parents trying to enter the school to find their children. Police cars were everywhere.

At first, he said, he did not think that anyone had been hurt. Then he heard that children had died. For hours, he awaited word about his daughter.

“I was kind of in shock,” he said, after hearing from the Texas Rangers. When he got home, he started to go through her pictures. “That’s when I kind of had the release,” he said. “I started crying and started mourning.”

‘She brought the neighborhood together’

Eva Mireles, who was in her 40s, loved teaching the children at Robb Elementary School, most recently fourth grade. Neighbors described her as a good-natured person who was usually smiling.

“She brought the neighborhood together,” said Javier Garcia, 18, who lived next door. “She loved those children.”

A cousin by marriage, Joe Costilla, 40, who lives down the block, said that outside of work Ms. Mireles liked to run marathons and was very athletic. “We were always hanging together — barbecues — she was a wonderful person,” he said, holding back tears. They had planned to get together over Memorial Day weekend.

Mr. Costilla’s mother, Esperanza, rushed to his home to console her grandchildren, ages 14 and 10, who knew her well.

“They are taking it really hard,” she said. “She was the kind of teacher everybody loved.”

Audrey Garcia, 48, the mother of a daughter with Down syndrome named Gabby, recalled Ms. Mireles as a transformational teacher in her child’s life.

Gabby is 23 now, with a high school diploma under her belt. Ms. Mireles had been her third-grade teacher. It was only a couple of years earlier, Ms. Garcia said, that schools in the Uvalde area had begun integrating children with mental disabilities into regular classrooms.

“It was new for teachers in that area,” Ms. Garcia said. Ms. Mireles, she said, threw herself into the work. “She used every teaching method she knew to help Gabby reach her highest potential,” she said. “She never saw that potential as lower than anyone else’s in her classroom.”

‘Tough guy’

Jose Flores, 10, had a pink T-shirt that said: “Tough guys wear pink.” His grandfather George Rodriguez called him “my little Josesito” and kept a photograph of the boy in his wallet.

Mr. Rodriguez, who also lost a niece in Tuesday’s shooting, attended counseling at the civic center in Uvalde but said it had offered him little reprieve from the pain. “They were beautiful, innocent children,” he said.

On the honor roll

Xavier Lopez, 10, made the honor roll on the day he was killed. He was eager to come home and share the news with his three brothers, but his grandparents said Xavier decided to stay at school to watch a movie and eat popcorn with his classmates.

They remembered Xavier as an exuberant baseball and soccer player who had a girlfriend at school with whom he chatted away on the phone.

Leonard Sandoval, 54, Xavier’s grandfather, stood outside the family’s home on Wednesday trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. “Why?” he asked. “Why him? Why the kids?”

‘A special, special boy’

Manny Renfro said his 9-year-old grandson, Uziyah Garcia, was a “special, special boy” who loved video games, football and brought joy to their family.

“I stand in grief,” he said in a brief phone interview. “I don’t sleep. I don’t eat.”

When their family was notified by the authorities on Tuesday that Uziyah was among the victims, his mother “cried and cried,” and the family was “hysterical,” Mr. Renfro said.

“I wept,” he said. “He was just a typical kid.”

Reporting was contributed by Richard Fausset, Jack Healy, Eduardo Medina, Christina Morales, Campbell Robertson, Edgar Sandoval, Alex Traub and John Yoon.

Compared with the elementary school shooting in Texas, everything else about this week will be a political footnote. But some of the footnotes are certainly interesting. If we want to pick a theme for Tuesday’s elections, it might be that Donald Trump’s influence isn’t nearly as strong as he thinks it is, and that he may be the only American voter whose chief preoccupation is revisiting the 2020 election on an hourly basis.

Getting over it is something Trump can’t abide. Consider the primary in Alabama for a Republican Senate candidate. Perhaps you remember — if you’re very, very, very into elections — that Trump began by backing Representative Mo Brooks, then changed his mind and unendorsed him? Cynics believed Trump had just decided Brooks was a loser, but it’s also possible the congressman had offended our former president by urging voters to “look forward.”

That’s the wrong direction to mention when you’re hanging out with the Trump camp.

“Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 presidential election scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you,’” Trump said as he retracted his endorsement.

The outcome of all this drama was that Brooks got less than a third of the vote, behind Katie Britt, the former chief of staff of retiring Senator Richard Shelby. Since Britt failed to get 50 percent, there will be a runoff. Winner will face Democratic nominee Will Boyd this fall.

One addendum — which you should really skip over if you’re feeling even modestly depressed: Both Britt and Brooks are in the gun camp as deep as humanly possible. Britt has ads in which she’s aiming a rifle and promising to “shoot straight.” The N.R.A., which endorsed Brooks, praised his efforts to protect “interstate transportation of firearms.” Those of us in states that are desperately trying to keep gun proliferation under control would appreciate it if he focused his energies on something else.

Trump’s biggest election night triumph may have been Herschel Walker, the former football player he backed for a Georgia Senate nomination. But Walker’s competition wasn’t exactly top-notch, and now he’ll be running against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who will probably take note of a few items on Walker’s résumé that Trump overlooked. Including allegations of domestic violence, refusal to take part in debates, and the day on the campaign trail when Walker expressed doubt about the theory of evolution. (If it were true, Walker mused, “Why are there still apes? Think about it.”)

On the plus side, there was Walker’s eagerness to spend $200,000 entertaining people at Mar-a-Lago. Nothing, it appears, raises the former president’s enthusiasm for a candidate like a willingness to make Donald Trump wealthier.

Jailah Silguero, 10, was the youngest of four children, the “baby” of her family, her father said. She loved going to school and seeing her friends. On Tuesday, she was among those killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Jailah had told her father, Jacob Silguero, 35, on Monday night that she wanted to stay home on Tuesday. It was uncharacteristic of her, and by morning, Mr. Silguero said, she seemed to have forgotten about it. She got dressed and went to school as usual.

“I can’t believe this happened to my daughter, my baby,” he said.

He added, “It’s always been a fear of mine to lose a kid.”

Mr. Silguero and the family were getting ready to go to the funeral home on Wednesday after having spent hours at the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center the day before waiting for information about Jailah. Officials asked the family to give a DNA sample using a swab.

“I figured after the DNA swab test, it was something bad,” he said. “About an hour later, they called to confirm that she had passed.”

Jailah’s siblings are taking it hard, Mr. Silguero said: “They just want their sister back.”

Jailah Silguero was among 21 people — 19 children and two adults — killed in the massacre on Tuesday.

Two cousins in one class

Jackie Cazares and Annabelle Rodriguez were cousins in the same classroom at Robb Elementary School. Jackie, who had her first communion two weeks ago, was the social one, said Polly Flores, who was Jackie’s aunt and Annabelle’s great-aunt. “She was outgoing; she always had to be the center of attention,” Ms. Flores said. “She was my little diva.”

Annabelle, an honor roll student, was quieter. But she and her cousin were close, so close that Annabelle’s twin sister, who was home-schooled, “was always jealous,” Ms. Flores said. “We are a very tight family,” she said. “It’s just devastating.”

A little girl who loved her friends

Amerie Jo Garza was a friendly 10-year-old who loved Play-Doh.

Amerie Jo was “full of life, a jokester, always smiling,” her father, Alfred Garza III, said in a brief phone interview. She didn’t talk a lot about school but liked spending time with her friends at lunch, in the playground and during recess. “She was very social,” he said. “She talked to everybody.”

Amerie Jo’s extended family had gathered in the room when the Texas Rangers broke the horrible news late Tuesday.

The family’s loss came after losing several loved ones to Covid-19 over the last two years.

“We were finally getting a break, nobody was passing away,” Mr. Garza said. “Then this happened.”

Mr. Garza, who works at a used car dealership in Uvalde, said that he was on a lunch break when Amerie Jo’s mother told him that she couldn’t get their daughter out of the school because it was on lockdown.

“I just went straight over there and found the chaos,” he said. He recalled seeing cars backing up on the streets, with parents trying to enter the school to find their children. Police cars were everywhere.

At first, he said, he didn’t think that anyone had been hurt. Then he heard that children had died. For hours, he awaited word about his daughter.

“I was in kind of in shock,” he said, after hearing from the Texas Rangers. When he got home, he started to go through her pictures. “That’s when I kind of had the release,” he said. “I started crying and started mourning.”

‘She brought the neighborhood together’

Eva Mireles, who was in her 40s, loved teaching the children at Robb Elementary School, most recently fourth grade. Neighbors described her as a good-natured person who was usually smiling.

“She brought the neighborhood together,” said Javier Garcia, 18, who lived next door. “She loved those children.”

A cousin by marriage, Joe Costilla, 40, who lives down the block, said that outside of work Ms. Mireles liked to run marathons and was very athletic. “We were always hanging together — barbecues — she was a wonderful person,” he said, holding back tears. They had planned to get together over Memorial Day weekend.

Mr. Costilla’s mother, Esperanza, rushed to his home to console her grandchildren, ages 14 and 10, who knew her well.

“They are taking it really hard,” she said. “She was the kind of teacher everybody loved.”

‘Tough guy’

Jose Flores, 10, had a pink T-shirt that said: “Tough guys wear pink.” His grandfather, George Rodriguez, called him “my little Josesito” and kept a photograph of the boy in his wallet.

Mr. Rodriguez, who also lost a niece in Tuesday’s shooting, attended counseling at the civic center in Uvalde but said it had offered him little reprieve from the pain. “They were beautiful, innocent children,” he said.