By Marlene LenthangNBC
News
Survivors of the Uvalde elementary school shooting have recounted the words the killer addressed to them before opening fire and killing 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday in Texas: "Good night," "everyone is going to die."
The minors also recounted how they got rid of the bullets by pretending to be dead and staining themselves with the blood of fallen comrades to deceive the murderer.
Miah Cerrillo, 11, a fourth grader, told CNN that his class was watching the movie
Lilo and Stitch
when the shooter entered the school.
According to the murderer, he looked at one of her teachers in her eyes and said: "Good night."
The girl told her story to a CNN producer.
She did not want to speak on camera and she refused to talk to men about her experience, she only felt comfortable talking to women, according to the network.
Children pray at a memorial site for the victims killed in the Uvalde elementary school shooting.AP
The girl was hit by fragments from the hail of bullets.
After shooting in her classroom, the killer entered an adjoining classroom, according to his account, and opened fire.
He claims he heard "sad music" and believes it was the shooter who played it.
It sounded like "'I want people to die' music," the minor explained to CNN's question.
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The girl added that when the killer entered the other classroom, she smeared herself with a friend's blood to appear dead.
She also said that she and a friend used her teacher's phone and called 911 for emergencies and said,
"Please send help because we're in trouble."
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Samuel Salinas, 10, was a student in teacher Irma Garcia's class Tuesday when the school shooting occurred.
"It was a normal day until my teacher said we were in severe isolation," and "then there were shots at the windows," he said in an interview broadcast on ABC on Friday.
He recounted that the gunman burst into the classroom and said: "They are all going to die." "He shot the teacher and then the children," the boy said.
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He explained that he survived by playing dead after being hit in the leg by a shrapnel that hit a chair between him and the shooter.
"I think he was aiming at me," the boy said, "I played dead so he wouldn't shoot me."
When the police finally entered the room and shot down the gunman, the children were evacuated and in the hasty exit Samuel Salinas says that he saw the bodies of his teacher and other students.
Questions about the police response to the shooting multiply
The investigation into the massacre continues, and many questions remain as to why it took so long for the police to shoot the gunman down.
At a news conference on Thursday, Texas authorities retracted earlier information, revealing that the killer entered the school unhindered and did not confront a school police officer as previously claimed.
Police say it was more than an hour from the first call to the 911 emergency phone until the killer was killed.
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Authorities shared a new timeline that reveals that at 11:28 a.m. Tuesday the killer hit a vehicle near the school and shot two people outside a funeral home across the street, then climbed up a fence to the primary.
They assured that the first call to 911 occurred at 11:30 in the morning.
The attacker entered the school 10 minutes later and four minutes later the police were on the scene.
The first agents called for backup, but tactical teams didn't arrive for an hour, Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Thursday.
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Texas investigators told NBC News the shooting victims were found in four classrooms.
The school serves students in second through fourth grades in the small Latino town of Uvalde, about 75 miles from the Mexican border.
The families asked the police to act
Parents and family members gathered outside the school during the shooting, begging and screaming for police to act, entering the center to save their children.
Angeli Rose Gomez told the Wall Street Journal that she was handcuffed by US Marshals outside the school for demanding that police enter the school.
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“The police were doing nothing,” he
told the newspaper.
“They were just standing outside the fence.
They weren't going in or running anywhere,” he added.
She said she waited patiently at first and when she became more fervent with her pleas, US Marshals allegedly arrested her for intervening in an active investigation.
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Authorities told NBC News in a statement that officers "never arrested or handcuffed anyone while securing the perimeter of the crime scene."
"Our officers maintained order and peace amidst the bereaved community gathered around the school," they said.