10-year-old girl, mom barricaded themselves inside room to survive Maine shooting
Zoey Levesque, 10, was attending a practice session with her youth bowling league on Wednesday night when she became a survivor of the latest mass shooting to hit the United States.
At least 18 people are believed to be dead and 13 injured from the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, which appears to have unfolded in multiple locations, including the bowling alley where Zoey was practicing and at a local bar, officials said.
Zoey told ABC News that she remains in shock after the shooting, which she and her mom, Meghan Hutchinson, survived by barricading themselves inside a back room of the bowling alley.
"I never thought I'd grow up and get a bullet in my leg," Zoey said. "It's just like, why? Why do people do this? I don't really know what to say."
She continued, "People have families and they're young people who still have long lives ahead of them, and people shouldn't be coming in and doing that. That's not okay."
Zoey and her mom said they were running from the suspected gunman when a bullet grazed Zoey's leg.
"My pants had, like, a bullet thing in it and then I looked and it wasn't deep. It was just like a scrape," Zoey said. "I was scared, but it didn't hurt, and I didn't know what happened until I started bleeding."
Zoey said she continued to run because she was scared for her life.
"I wasn't worried about that," she said of her injury. "I was more worried about, like, am I going to live? Am I going to make it out of here? Like, what's going to happen? Are the cops going to come?"
Hutchinson told ABC News that she heard a "loud pop" and then saw the suspected gunman right after he entered the bowling alley. The person of interest in the shooting, Robert Card, is still at large and has been on the run for hours, according to law enforcement.
"When I turned around, I saw the shooter right behind me," Hutchinson said. "He had just come in the door."
Hutchinson said she and Zoey and other families ran through swinging doors between the lanes and barricaded themselves in a back room for around 20 minutes.
"While we were in the back room, another child came in whose arm had a massive hole in it and he was bleeding profusely," Hutchinson said. "We barricaded in there and another parent was in the room with me. She had a phone. She called 911."
Hutchinson said while the kids hid under a desk in the room, she worked to move a shelf against the door to the room to further barricade it.
When the police arrived, Hutchinson said she and others were too scared to let them inside the room.
"They were banging on the door but we actually wouldn't open the door. We didn't want to open the door. We weren't sure who it was. We couldn't identify them," she said. "But eventually, [the police] just pushed their way in and ... they took us out into the parking lot."
Like her daughter, Hutchinson said she remains in shock after surviving the shooting.
"It's very surreal. It's a moment in time, a feeling, I never want to feel again," she said. "It's really sad ... This was probably the worst night of our lives."
