MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
At Annunciation Catholic School, some of the preschoolers have class in the basement of the church next door, where they huddled when gunfire rang out yesterday during the Mass upstairs. One of them was 4-year-old Ayla Turner. Her father, Brooks Turner, was driving to work when his mom called with news of the shooting.
BROOKS TURNER: I immediately hung up with my mom, called Annunciation. And I was like, hi, so, you know, I just heard from my mom that there was a shooting happening. And when they said yes, I just felt like I was going to throw up. But they were very quick to, you know, assure me that the preschool students were OK and that I could come to the school and pick her up. I had to park three blocks away. Like, I basically just started running to the school, and I'm not an athletic person.
So, you know, it was like, I just wanted to get there as fast as I could. Like, Ayla, you know, jumped onto me when I - later, my mom was asking her, like, how did you find Daddy? And she was like, I saw his black hair and then I ran and I ran, and I jumped. And that's basically what happened. And that was a huge relief. And, you know, I feel really lucky because obviously many others weren't.
How Ayla recounts it was that there were people banging as if they were trying to break down the ceiling to get inside. She said that she hid in the play kitchen that's in their room. She told me that she laid flat on her belly and that she was scared, so she covered her eyes. And at some point, a police officer picked her up and was carrying her. And she said that she saw broken glass. She did say at one point to me after we got home, like, I don't ever want to go back to that school again. It's too loud. It's just too loud.
We are also sitting at home. And, you know, we usually, you know, especially right now when the weather is beautiful, keep our doors open and our windows open. And she really wanted to have everything shut. She also asked to look at pictures of her school. So she clearly understands something traumatic happened. But then also, she was goofing around and climbing on me and tickling me and jumping, you know, being her normal self. So it is that sort of, like, going back and forth. It was only her third day of school. I mean, it breaks my heart, well, in so many different ways.
MARTIN: Brooks Turner sharing his family's experience of yesterday's shooting in Minneapolis. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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