Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of two teachers shot, has died days later
(Picture: Twitter)The husband of a teacher killed in the Texas school shooting has died just days after from a “broken heart”.
The gunman targeted Irma Garcia’s fourth grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, killing her, co-teacher Eva Mireles, and 19 children inside.
Just two days after the attack, Mrs Garcia’s grieving husband collapsed and died at home from a heart attack, a family member said.
Joe Garcia, 50, had left flowers at his wife’s memorial Thursday morning in Uvalde, Texas, and returned home, where he “pretty much just fell over” and died, his nephew John Martinez told the New York Times.
He added that Mr Garcia “passed away due to grief, I truly am at a loss for words for how we are all feeling”.
The couple had been married for 24 years and had four children.
Mr Martinez said the family was struggling to grasp that while the couple’s oldest son trained for combat in the Marine Corps, it was his mother who was shot to death.
“Stuff like this should not be happening in schools,” he told the Detroit Free Press.
The Garcias loved to barbecue, 48-year-old Irma had written in an online letter to her students at Robb Elementary School.
She enjoyed listening to music and travelling to Concan, a small community on the Frio River about 25 miles north of Uvalde.
The school year, scheduled to end Thursday, was Mrs Garcia’s 23rd year of teaching and she was previously named the school’s teacher of the year.
The motive for the massacre, the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook attack in Newtown, Connecticut, is still under investigation with authorities saying the 18-year-old gunman had no known criminal or mental health history.
The suspect, Salvador Ramos, was inside the classroom for more than an hour before he was killed in a shootout with police, authorities said.
The initial response of police has come under increasing scrutiny, with some witnesses saying they begged officers to go inside to stop the killer, but they did not immediately do so.
