“He just saw the shooter come to the door and say ‘Goodnight’ to his teacher and he shot her,” AJ’s mom, Kassandra Chavez, told CNN. “And then (the gunman) just announced, ‘Are you all ready to die?’ and went mad, said my son, with a gun shooting everywhere.’ Jaydien Canizales, 10, remembers that, too — how his teacher ran into one of his friends and how the gunman knelt down as he addressed the room of fourth-graders with his threats. Two teachers and 19 students, aged between 9 and 11, were killed that day. AJ hid under the backpacks. Jaydien and a friend hid under a table with a curtain and tried to get others to join them as they closed their eyes and covered their ears in horror. Ten-year-old Noah Orona was afraid he was too tall to get under the table with Jaydien. He was shot in the back and fell to the floor of Classroom 112, said his mother, Jessica Orona. For 77 minutes there they had to stay, until the officers opened the door of connecting room 111 and confronted the gunman, killing him. Orona described some of the sights and sounds from those 77 minutes Noah told her. “One of the little girls he was laying next to, all she could hear was gurgling because she was trying to breathe but she couldn’t because she was shot and you could just hear her choking,” he said. Chavez recalled seeing AJ in the hospital, his face smeared with someone else’s blood, probably from the one lying on the floor. “I just saw my son’s face with blood on it. And I thought, where is he bleeding from? And the doctor said, “He’s fine. It’s not his,” he said. Arguments and anger over how long it took authorities to restore order continue to rage in Uvalde, the state capital of Austin and beyond. What officers did while the gunman was inside the classrooms remains largely unclear, and some officials have questioned the credibility of the various investigations working to figure out what went wrong. Scenes from that day and the anxious wait are repeated for the parents as well. Chavez told her son how she was outside the school, where families gathered within minutes of the shooting. “We’re out there waiting to hear or for something to happen. News that you come out and you’re there laying on the ground bleeding with all the cops standing there in the hallway,” he told AJ. Orona said the delay was impossible to explain to Noah. “You know, to tell them, ‘Yeah, they were there, but no one came to help you.’ AJ heard the cops right outside the classroom door. So does Jaydien. His mother said she remembers the children being told by police to call for help if they needed it. But a girl doing just that caught the attention of the gunman, who then shot and killed her.

Families unsure of what’s next

Tuesday marks seven weeks since the massacre. The families of the survivors still don’t know what lies ahead. “You would think that things are back to normal — as people assume they are — just because (my son) is alive and here, but it’s not,” Orona said. “My son has trouble sleeping, he’s in big crowds, anything loud scares him, he’s alone.” He continued: “Of course we feel blessed that he’s here… but every day is a struggle. It’s something that’s not going to heal in a week, a month.” Jaydien’s mother, Azeneth Rodriguez, added: “He will remember what happened that day and it will stick in his head for the rest of his life.” Families knew to keep their children away from Fourth of July fireworks with all the sounds of the explosions, but there are plenty of other triggers, they said. “We were having a barbecue the other day and he said, ‘What’s that smell, that burning smell?’ Orona said of her son, Noah. “And I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And he just said, ‘I smell this smoke — and so we were in class.’”

“Our children are not the same anymore”

AJ and Jaydien are often angry about what happened, that they couldn’t stop it and no one else did, their mothers say. After an outburst, AJ will break down, Chavez said. “He tells me, ‘Mom, I hate the shooter. I hate that he killed my friends and my two teachers.” Jaydien asked to speak to CNN to give his version of what went wrong at the school. “If we had more people, this would never have happened,” he said, referring to the officers. He lost his cousin Rogelio Torres and his best friend, Jace Luevanos, both 10, in the next classroom. He said he now wants “cops everywhere” to stop more violence, but when asked what makes it difficult today, he replied: “That my mom can hardly handle anything.” Rodriguez said she hadn’t been to work since May 24, the day of the shooting. Financial help was available, but she had to go and find it — no one called to check in or offer it. Chavez said: “We don’t want to bother or bother anyone about this, but at the same time, the bills don’t stop.” And those bills will include medical visits, therapy, and probably more things than families can fathom right now that demand their time as well as their money. Orona said, “It’s something that doesn’t have time — to say, OK, give us enough for a month or a year or something. They’re going to have problems for the rest of their lives. . . . The kids aren’t the same anymore It’s not like it used to be.” Some parents of the surviving children have even apologized to the families of the dead because their own sons and daughters are alive. The mothers CNN spoke to said they had not done media interviews before to make sure attention was paid to the bereaved families and those who lost. Orona believes her son was meant to be spared. Rodriguez fears that something else bad could happen to Jaydien at any moment. Chavez says she’s doing her best to take care of AJ while not neglecting her other two children.
She fought not to cry in front of her son in the hospital as she cleaned someone else’s blood from his face. Orona says she hasn’t cried at all. “The day it happened, I just shut down and just said, ‘I have to be strong for my son.’ And it was hard. There are times when I just want to break down and cry, but I can’t bring myself to do that,” she said. “I can’t bring myself to cry right now. Maybe in a few months I’ll break down completely. But I, it’s just too hard.”