Uvalde, Texas, school teacher Nicole Ogburn likely saved her students' lives when she told them to hit the floor just seconds before bullets shattered her classroom windows last Tuesday.
"I just kept hearing boom, boom, boom. ... It just kept going off, and it felt like an eternity," she told TODAY in an interview that aired Monday.
"I had one student laying on top of me, and I had a bunch of other students right over here by me, and we were all holding hands," she continued. "I just remember praying, 'Please God, please God, keep us safe.'"
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Ogburn and her 15 students were able to get to safety during last week's shooting at Robb Elementary School, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers, the country's worst school shooting in almost a decade.
"There was glass on the windowsill," she told "Nightly News" in an interview that aired Sunday. "I stayed and just kept getting kids out, and then me and the last two kids jumped out the window, and we just ran. They kept telling us, 'Run, run, run.'"
“I can close my eyes and I see that image of him and that gun walking up to my school, and it haunts me, but at the same time, I’ve told myself I will not live in fear. I want to do that and teach my own children that. You can’t live in fear," she said.
Ogburn added that in the days since the tragedy, multiple parents have texted her to tell her that she's their hero.
"I'm not a hero in any way," she said, getting emotional. "But I do love those kids very much."
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the tight-knit but devastated community over the weekend, consoling families of those who'd been killed.
When an onlooker outside a Texas church urged Biden to "do something," he replied, "We will." In a tweet sent when he was leaving Texas, Biden stressed the White House's commitment to "turning this pain into action."
The Justice Department has launched an investigation into the response to the attack after as many as 19 officers waited 47 minutes before engaging the gunman.
There are three people still hospitalized at University Hospital in San Antonio after the attack, NBC News correspondent Morgan Chesky reported, including a 10-year-old girl in serious condition.
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