It’s been just three days since an 18-year-old gunman walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, with an AR-15 rifle, opened fire, and murdered 19 children and two teachers. Now, some of the survivors of that horrifying attack are telling their stories.
Amber Gonzales told the Los Angeles Times that her 8-year-old daughter Aubree hid under her desk during the shooting.
“She’s terrified to go anywhere without me and her dad,” Gonzales told theTimes. “She can’t sleep by herself. She’s scared to take a shower by herself. She’s scared to even watch a movie in the living room by herself. I put her to bed last night and she told me she felt like somebody was looking at her — she’s just really shaken up by it.”
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Another boy, who did not want to be identified, told KENS-5 in San Antonio, Texas, that the shooter peeked his head through the door and announced to the fourth-graders: “It’s time to die.”
"When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something so he won't find us… I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us,” the unnamed boy recalled.
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“When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her," the boy said. "The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.”
The boy said he and his friends came out from under the table when the shooting ended. He said the teachers [Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia] were “nice,” and “they went in front of my classmates to help. To save them.”
According to Raw Story, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo told CNN she survived the shooting by smearing herself with her classmate’s blood and pretending to be dead.
CNN’s Nora Neus says Miah and her classmates were watching a Disney movie Tuesday to celebrate the end of the school year when their teacher got an email warning them about a gunman in the halls of the school.
Neus explains that as the teacher went to the door, she found herself face to face with the teen shooter. He proceeded to shoot the window out of the door and enter the room.
"Miah says it just happened all so fast, he backed the teacher into the classroom and he made eye contact with the teacher again, looked her right in the eye, and said, 'Goodnight,' and then shot her and killed her," Neus said. “He started open firing in the classroom. He hit the other teacher and a lot of Miah's friends. At that point, Miah was hit by fragments of the bullets. You could even see them yesterday on her back, on her shoulders, the back of her head," Neus added.
The gunman then went into an adjoining classroom and began shooting there.
"At that point, Miah could hear screams, she heard a lot more gunfire, and then she said she heard music," Neus said. "She thinks it was the gunman that put it on. He started blasting sad music, and I asked her, like, what was that? What kind of music? What do you mean by that? And she said -- she just said it sounded like 'I want people to die music.'"
Miah told Neus that she was “pretty sure” the friend next to her was already dead when “she put her hands in her friend's blood and then smeared it, she said, all over her body.”
Miah said she stayed covered in her friend's blood, lying on the floor, until the police came into the room.
Second-grader Jayden Perez told CNN he was “still sad” about his friends who died. “It was very terrifying because I never thought that was going to happen.”
Perez says he and his friends were rescued by police and escaped through a window.
When CNN correspondent Adrienne Broaddus asked Perez if he wanted to go back to school, he said:
“I don't wanna, no. ‘Cause I don't want anything to do with another shooting and me in the school."
