Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter, Lexi, was killed in the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, opened up about losing some of her late daughter’s belongings in the flood that has rocked Uvalde and south Texas.
In an Instagram video posted Wednesday, Mata-Rubio said last week she was at home eating lunch when she got a knock on the door and was told to evacuate.
“We got the kids, our dogs, and I got a bin and I just filled it with as many of Lexi’s things as I could. And we left,” she said.
A flood ripped through Uvalde last week, totaling more than 2 feet in some places. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Uvalde was “hit very, very hard,” and at least two people have died from the flooding. The Nueces River, which is about 200 miles from Uvalde, rose to 28 feet by last Thursday, beating its 1996 record of 25 feet. This flooding comes just one year after the deadly Central Texas flooding that killed at least 139 people, many of them young girls at Camp Mystic.
When Mata-Rubio and her family returned to their home two days after they evacuated, they saw that the flood destroyed some of Lexi’s furniture, like her bed, her dresser, and some more personal items.
Mata-Rubio said the dresser in her bedroom was damaged, so she grabbed some shirts from it, including one from Lexi that had her handprints on it that she had made for Mother’s Day. She put it in a bag, but she said somehow it accidentally got thrown away. She searched in the trash and dumpsters but wasn’t able to find it.
“That’s a really hard loss for me,” Mata-Rubio said.
The home’s drywall was cut and sprayed for mold, and they had to remove the home’s kitchen cabinets and one bathroom.
“Some of my neighbors lost absolutely everything,” she said. “It’s been a difficult week. But I was lucky to save a lot of her stuff. A lot of it was in bins or hanging, displayed.”
She added: “I’ve just been trying to stay positive for my kids because I know this has been very stressful on them. That’s where I’m at.”
In 2023, Mata-Rubio moved her family out of the home Lexi last lived and moved across town.
“I would have stayed in that house forever,” she told ABC News. “I would have begged the owner to let me buy it eventually, but I knew it wasn’t good for everyone else.”
Felix Rubio, Mata-Rubio’s husband and Lexi’s father, told ABC News that as they were moving out, he called out for Lexi one more time.
“That was hard,” Felix Rubio said with tears streaming down his face.
Many parents of the school shooting victims have kept their children’s room as it was the day they died. “All The Empty Rooms,” a 2025 documentary that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film, features the victims’ bedrooms, including Jacklyn Cazares, who was 9 when she died in the Uvalde mass shooting. CBS News also featured eight school shooting victims’ bedrooms in a photography series.