Riley Dumont flung herself on top of her daughter when a gunman opened fire in a bowling alley in a shooting spree in Maine that left 18 people dead.
"It felt like it lasted a lifetime," Dumont told ABC News of Wednesday evening's attack at the bowling alley in the town of Lewiston.
Dumont said her father, a retired police officer, erected a barricade when the shooting began using "tables and a big bench."
"I was laying on top of my daughter," she told ABC. "My mother was laying on top of me. I just remember people sobbing and crying."
Law enforcement were searching on Thursday for the gunman who opened fire in the bowling venue and then a bar about a 10-minute drive away in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States this year.
Robert Card, 40, a certified firearms instructor and US Army reservist, should be considered armed and dangerous, police said.
Zoey Levesque, 10, told ABC News that she was at the alley with her mother, Meghan Hutchinson, for youth night when the shooting began.
Levesque was grazed in the leg by a bullet.
"I was scared, but it didn't hurt, and I didn't know what happened until I started bleeding," she said.
"I just never thought someone would walk in and then just start shooting and taking people's lives away," Levesque said. "People shouldn't be coming in and doing that. That's not OK."
"Like why? Like why do people do this?" she asked.
Hutchinson told ABC she barricaded herself and her daughter in a back room until police arrived.
"While we were in the back room, another child came in whose arm had a massive bullet in it and he was bleeding profusely," Hutchinson said.
She said they initially did not want to open the door for the police.
"They were banging on the door," she said. "We weren't sure who it was."
- 'No words to fix this' -
Another survivor of the attack told CNN he was 15 feet (five meters) from the gunman when he opened fire. He thought at first it was a balloon popping.
"And as soon as I turned and saw it was not a balloon and he was holding a weapon, I just booked it down the lane and I slid basically into where the pins are and climbed up into the machine and was on top of the machines for about 10 minutes until the cops got there," the man told CNN.
In a statement on their Facebook page, the Just-In-Time bowling alley said "none of this seems real, but unfortunately it is.
"We are devastated for our community and our staff. We lost some amazing and whole hearted people from our bowling family and community last night.
"There are no words to fix this or make it better."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
