Editor's note: Some of the testimony described below is extremely graphic.
(UVALDE, Texas) -- Robb Elementary School teacher Elsa Avila was taking photos of her fourth-graders with their science projects on May 24, 2022, when she said a young girl noticed something was wrong -- that other students was running to their classroom and screaming.
Avila testified that her students immediately hid, as they had during lockdown training.
"We heard loud, loud shots in the hallway," Avila said on Tuesday at the trial of former Uvalde, Texas, school police officer Adrian Gonzales. "They knew that it was, you know, a real thing."
When Avila briefly stood up to instruct her students to make sure everyone was "safe and out of sight," she said she felt a piercing pain on her left side.
"I felt the burning pain,” she said. "I put my hand on my side and I saw blood. When I took my hand away, I saw blood. So, I knew that I had been shot."
As she recounted her injury, Avila banged her hands on the witness stand -- the wood ringing from her Rosary ring -- to describe the sounds she heard.
“I fell to the floor, and we kept hearing the shots," she said.
Avila said she was lying on the floor in intense pain and "trying so hard to keep it in."
She said her students tried to comfort her while they sheltered in place.
"They were hugging each other. They were helping each other stay quiet. Some of them were tapping me. They were telling me, 'Miss, Miss. We love you. We love you. You're going to be OK, you're going to be OK,'" she testified.
Avila's harrowing testimony comes on the second week of Gonzales' trial. Prosecutors allege Gonzales, who is charged with child endangerment, did not follow his training and endangered the 19 students who died and an additional 10 surviving students.
Gonzales has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers argue he is being unfairly blamed for a broader law-enforcement failure that day. It took 77 minutes before law enforcement mounted a counterassault to end the May 2022 rampage.
Avila maintained her composure throughout most of her testimony, though she broke down in tears when she described what she felt in those moments.
"I was in so much pain towards the end there, my body was going into shock, and my legs were already starting to shake. My whole body was starting to shake," she said. "I kept praying, you know, God, please don’t let me die."
During a brief cross examination, Avila testified about hearing officers trying to negotiate with the gunman.
"I heard a voice saying, you know, 'Sir, we need you to stop, we don't want anyone else to get hurt,'" she said.
Avila testified that, even when officers broke through her classroom windows to begin rescuing students, some students wanted to stay with her due to her injury.
Former fourth-grade teacher Arnulfo Reyes also testified on Monday and Tuesday, recounting in excruciating detail the moments when gunman Salvador Ramos shot and wounded him and shot and killed all 11 children in his classroom.
Reyes said he fell to the ground after he was struck by gunfire. Then, the shooter "came around and he shot the kids," Reyes testified, maintaining his composure.
After the first series of gunshots, Reyes testified that a student in a nearby classroom mistook Ramos for police.
"A student from that classroom said, 'Officer, come in here. We're in here,'" Reyes testified. "And I heard he walked over there, and I heard more shooting."
As Reyes lay on the ground bleeding from wounds to his arm and back, he said the shooter returned to his classroom and noticed he was still alive.
"He came and he tried to taunt me. He got some of my blood and splashed it on my face," he said.
During cross-examination, defense lawyer Nico LaHood tried to deflect some blame from Gonzales, suggesting Reyes was at least partially at fault for leaving his classroom door unlocked the morning of the shooting.