(NewsNation) — The first funeral services for the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School will happen Tuesday morning.
Families in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, are laying to rest the 19 children and two adults shot and killed inside the school.
Trey Ganem volunteered to make custom caskets for several of the children and a teacher.
“I’m taking a little bit of the sting out of what’s happened,” Ganem said.
“We’re creating the last thing a parent can ever do for their child,” he also said.
The funerals will be happening as many still have questions about police response the day of the shooting. Investigators revealed it took close to an hour to get inside the classroom with the shooter, and that more than a dozen officers waited in the hallway despite calls to 911 from desperate children inside the school.
The heartbreak in Uvalde is visible around the community. One memorial outside of a daycare just minutes away from Robb Elementary shows empty seats for each of the 19 children killed.
Marcey Heschel is a therapist. She traveled to Uvalde to help in the days following the shooting.
“The fact that this was human caused, and there was intent to cause harm to our most vulnerable, which are our children, and that’s not something that anyone can process,” Heschel said.
Heschel says the questions surrounding the police response may be making the healing process more difficult for families.
A special city council meeting that was initially scheduled for Tuesday has been called off. At the meeting, Uvalde School District police chief Pete Arredondo was expected to be sworn in as a member of city council.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin issued the following statement on the cancellation:
“Our focus on Tuesday is on our families who lost loved ones. We begin burying our children tomorrow, the innocent victims of last week’s murders at Robb Elementary School. The special City Council meeting will not take place as scheduled. Pete Arredondo was duly elected to the City Council. There is nothing in the City Charter, Election Code, or Texas Constitution that prohibits him from taking the oath of office. To our knowledge, we are currently not aware of any investigation of Mr. Arredondo.”
The Department of Justice has stepped in to investigate the shooting to hopefully bring some clarity to decisions made inside the school.