Actor Matthew McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves, brought a pair of green, high-top Converse to Washington, D.C., with them on Tuesday. A heart was drawn on the toe of the shoes.
The shoes belonged to 10-year-old Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, who was killed in her elementary school classroom in Uvalde, Texas, by a mass shooter two weeks ago. She was among 19 children and two teachers who were killed that day.
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Rodriguez’s body was so badly mutilated by the gunman’s AR-15 that she could only be identified by her green Converse, McConaughey, who was born and raised in Uvalde, said at Tuesday’s White House Press briefing.
McConaughey spent the last weeks in his hometown talking to the people who live there, and some of the victims’ families. He eulogized some of the victims, and recalled meeting with the funeral home’s cosmetologist who was tasked with having to “restore” the slain children so that they could lie in repose. “They needed extensive restoration,” said McConaughey. “Why? Due to the exceptionally large exit wounds of an AR-15 rifle. Most of the bodies were so mutilated that only DNA tests or green Converse could identify them.”
“Many children were left not only dead, but hollow,” he added.
McConaughey was in D.C. to lobby for bipartisan gun control legislation in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, which he said was a way to make “the loss of these lives matter.”
He directly appealed to responsible gun owners, many of whom he said he’d spoken to in Uvalde and who told him they were “fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked.”
“We need background checks. We need to raise the minimum age to purchase assault rifles to 21,” said McConaughey. “We need red flag laws.”
