WINDER, Ga. — Ariel Bowling was about to walk to the vending machine with a friend when she heard the first gunshots.
"We ran back inside, and we closed the door, and we all ran to the corner," Bowling said. "And that's whenever I called my mom, and I told her that, hey, this isn't a drill. There's an active shooter."
Bowling is a 10th-grade student at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, where a 14-year-old boy is accused of open-firing a gun and killing four people. Two of those who were shot and killed were teachers, and the other two were students.
According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, around 10:20 Wednesday morning, the Barrow County Sheriff's Office received alerts of an "active shooter."
Bowling said the halls were smoky, and she could see "blood everywhere."
"At first, I was thinking, like she said, she was kidding, or she just wanted to leave school," Bowling's mother, Tabatha Massey, said. "But then I heard the gunshots, five gunshots, and then I screamed Ariel and looked at my phone, and it was dead."
The next 30 minutes were terrifying for Massey, who began making her way up to the school alongside countless other parents and loved ones.
"I couldn't breathe," Massey said. "I couldn't imagine losing my kid while she was at school, while she was supposed to be safe."
Her oldest daughter was driving Massey to the school and kept telling her, "All you can do is pray."
"I just couldn't feel anything except for so scared that my kid was gonna be gone, torn from me while she was at school," Massey said. "The only thing I did do was I prayed to the Lord. Please let her be OK. Please let the kid get caught. Please just make it stop."
Massey and others were stopped by police, she said, but luckily, Bowling was able to text her mom and tell her she was OK.
"But I did get the text that, 'Mom, I'm fine.' That text message was the best text message I ever saw," Massey said. "You will never tell me anything, anything better, except for when my kids were born and they were fine. That's it."
"I just wish this on nobody, and it's horrible to think that just a normal day at school can become so heartbreaking to other people," Bowling said.