BLUMENAU, Brazil (AP) — They sent their seven-year-old to day care Wednesday and plunged into the deepest nightmare of any parent’s life.
A man with a hatchet jumped over a wall and burst into the day care center in southern Brazil, killing little Larissa Maia Toldo and three other children. On Thursday, Larissa’s parents held hands over her white-draped coffin, decorated with a few bouquets, as three of the four victims were prepared for burial.
The parents, along with other mourners at the São José cemetery, which overlooks Blumenau’s German district, could not speak with the press as they grieved. All of Brazil was struggling for answers in the face of unspeakable violence waged against the most innocent.
All four victims had been their parents’ only children, with no siblings, Mayor Mário Hildebrandt told reporters. An Easter celebration aimed at children was cancelled.
Mourners had to either drive or climb up a steep ladder to the burial site in a private room or the cemetery. A middle-aged woman decided to stop next to traditional grave on the way up and cried for one of the children, whose casket was being taken by a black van a few meters away.
“My nephew. My nephew, my nephew,” she cried.
Dozens of mourners gathered at the day care center in Blumenau to pray, to lay flowers for the victims — aged 5 to 7 — and to cry. At least four other children were wounded in the attack, the second at a school in the past week.
Carlos Kroetz and other parents arrived to collect backpacks left at the center during the mayhem.
“My daughter thinks a thief came in and ran away without harming anyone,” Kroetz told The Associated Press while holding his 6-year-old’s Minnie Mouse bag. “She knew kids who died. We still have to figure out a way to tell her. For now, she is afraid of going to the bathroom by herself, because she thinks the thief will be there.”
Franciele Chequeto said one of the girls killed was friends with her 7-year-old son, Gabriel.
“He wasn’t understanding,” Chequeto said. “I sat down and told him that he no longer will be able to see some of his little friends.”
A vigil outside the center Wednesday evening ended after parents released four white balloons over the school.
School attacks in Brazil have happened with ever greater frequency in recent years.
Justice Minister Flávio Dino met with representatives from student associations, then told reporters in Brasilia that he was directing 150 million reais ($30 million) from the nation’s public security fund to shore up school safety. He said that money will pay for both heightened policing and an expansion of a Brasilia-based team for the monitoring of deep-web communities, places on the internet where hate speech and violence can be glorified.
Education Minister Camilo Santana announced the creation of a group to address school violence. Santana will lead the group, which is scheduled to meet for the first time Thursday.
“There are no words to console the families. Anyone who has lost a relative knows that there are no words,” a teary-eyed President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Wednesday at the start of a ministerial meeting. His ministers observed a minute of silence.
From 2000 to 2022, there were 16 attacks or violent episodes in schools in Brazil, according to a report from researchers led by Daniel Cara, an education professor at the University of Sao Paulo.
Last week, a student in Sao Paulo fatally stabbed a teacher and wounded several others. Brazil has seen at least one past attack on a day care center, too. That attack also occurred in Santa Catarina state, in May 2021, when an assailant used a dagger to kill three children under 2 years old and two adults.
Often, the killers are young people who engage in misogynistic or racist speech, employ neo-Nazi and fascist symbols and enter online communities where violence is lauded, Cara told The Associated Press.
Young people who are suffering find shelter in these online communities, according to Cleo Garcia, a member of the GEPEM research group investigating bullying and violence in schools.
“In the United States, this is already considered an epidemic and we hope it doesn’t reach that point here,” Garcia said.
Simone Aparecida Camargo, a teacher at the day care center attacked Wednesday, told the AP she believes unrestricted access to phones and the internet is to blame, and said she was skeptical of the push by authorities to boost the number and frequency of patrols around schools.
“How long can we have police near schools? A week? They need to look deeper,” she said.
Camargo locked dozens of children in a bathroom after she heard a colleague screaming about a man who had broken into the day care center, potentially averting an even greater tragedy.
“We didn’t think there was a massacre happening out there,” said Camargo, who has worked at the day care center for five years. “We see this abroad and never thought it could happen here.”
