Students recount experience inside school during shooting

NEWTOWN, Conn. (WHDH) -- Children who were inside the school when the shooting started explained the chaos in their own words.

The account of a young boy said to be delivering an attendance report to the office at Sandy Hook Elementary School when the shootings took place is surreal.

"I saw some of the bullets going past the hall that I was right next to and then a teacher pulled me into her classroom,” said the student.

He said he heard a sound like someone kicking a door. His mother, clinging to him, had words of thanks.

"We’re just so grateful to the teacher who saved him."

The reporter asked: "you think the teacher she saved his life?"

"She definitely did. He had bullets going by him and she grabbed him and another child, and she pulled him inside a classroom."

Brendan Murray, a fourth-grader, described chaos.

"I was in the gym at the time, and so the teachers- we heard lots of bangs. And we thought that it was the custodian knocking stuff down. We heard screaming. And so we uhm- we uh- we went onto- we went to the wall. And we sat down. And then the police came in saying 'is he in here?' Then he ran out. And then our teacher- then somebody yelled 'get to a safe place'. So we went to a closet in the gym, and we stayed there for a little while. And then the police were like knocking on the door saying 'we're evacuating people. We're evacuating people,'" said Murray.

As one woman walked away from the school, she was heard crying “why, why?”

A policeman was heard saying it was the worst thing he'd seen in his career.

A nurse from nearby Danbury Hospital described the scene there as parents waited for word about their children.

"All these parents were waiting for their kids. They thought they were still alive. There's 20 parents that were just told that their children were dead. It was awful."

By late Friday afternoon and into the evening, evacuated children were being cared for and reunited with their parents at a nearby firehouse.