Escola Sigma was a private school in a middle-class Salvador neighborhood, serving about 250 students from primary school through secondary. On the morning of October 28, the shooter - a seventeen-year-old boy identified in court records only by the initials E.R., because he was a minor under Brazilian law - brought to school a handgun he had taken from his father. He fired four shots. The first struck Vanessa Batista, who died almost immediately. He then walked six meters and fired three more times at Natasha Ferreira, hitting her in the head, the lung, and the neck. After the shooting, he went out to the school playground, where witnesses described him as nervous and threatening to take his own life. The Military Police arrived. They asked his 21-year-old brother to come negotiate. The brother did, and E.R. surrendered.

The school issued a note that same day announcing the shooter's expulsion and cancelling afternoon classes so students and teachers could attend Vanessa's burial. Her corneas were donated to Salvador's Transplant Center; she was laid to rest that afternoon at Jardim da Saudade Cemetery. Natasha's family made their own preparations a few hours later. Both girls had been bullying victims in the lead-up to the shooting - according to classmates, they had given the shooter a low score during a school sports day a month earlier, and he had threatened them repeatedly since. None of that context makes the shooting explicable. It makes it tragic in a different way: three children at an ordinary private school, and a gun kept in a home where a teenager could find it, and one morning in October that did not stay ordinary. Because E.R. was a minor, his sentencing went to the juvenile court. His punishment was never made public. The records simply say the file went to the Children's Prosecutor's Office and Youth Court, and that within 45 days a measure would be defined. The families of Vanessa Batista and Natasha Ferreira were left with the silence the law permitted the court to keep.

In 2002, Brazil did not yet have the kind of school-shooting tracking that had been established in the United States after the 1999 Columbine killings. The Escola Sigma shooting was reported in UOL, Folha de S.Paulo, Diário de Pernambuco, but it did not become a national pattern in the public imagination. In the two decades since, there have been more. Realengo in 2011, Goiânia in 2017, Suzano in 2019, Aracruz in 2023 - a growing list that Brazilian researchers now study as a phenomenon. Vanessa and Natasha's names are on that list. They should not have to be. They had families. They had classmates who still remember. Vanessa's corneas went to someone who needed them, which is a small and specific kind of dignity in a day that offered very little. Salvador is a city that honors its dead - there is a reason baianas still carry offerings to Candomblé terreiros, a reason the Bonfim ribbons tied to the church gate are prayers as much as souvenirs. What happened at Escola Sigma on October 28, 2002, is part of the city's memory. These were its children.