Just 90 minutes after he and his family celebrated their enrollment in the honor roll at Robb Elementary, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at his small town school in Uvalde, Texas.
Jayden and some of his teammates hid in a backpacking area during filming. Others in his class were under a table, he told CNN. All the while, they wondered what would happen to them.
Now, Jayden is afraid it will happen again, and he and other children are afraid to go back to school.
“Because after what happened, I don’t want to,” Jayden said. “I don’t want anything to do with another shooting or me at school.”
Edward Timothy Silva, a sophomore at Robb Elementary, is also worried about returning after the summer break.
“It breaks my heart,” her mother, Amberlynn Diaz, told CNN’s Laura Coates. “I don’t want him to be afraid of school. I want him to keep learning and not be afraid to go back to school. I want him to have a normal life again.”
Edward, in a classroom near where the fatalities occurred, heard “loud noises,” he said. “A kind of fireworks.”
A woman working at the school told him and his classmates to hide, she said, while the lights were off inside the classroom.
He and his classmates had been doing active shooter exercises since they were in kindergarten, he said. On Tuesday, “I learned we were doing a real drill,” he said.
Some of his roommates in the room were crying and he prayed, Edward said. “I was praying, thinking, why is this happening?”
Diaz said he was told the shooter was next to his son’s classroom.
“That’s when I completely lost it,” he said.
It was 40 minutes before he found out he was safe.
“I had to run over there to make sure,” he said. “I had to see it to believe them.”
Now Edward is sleeping with his parents again and is afraid of guns.
“I’m afraid someone will shoot me,” he said.
During his CNN interview, Jayden began listing the names of friends who were killed. Then he stopped, looked at a row of crosses bearing his names, and said, “Basically all of them.”
Now the child reminds everyone to hug those you love while you can.
“You never know when you might lose someone close,” he said.
CNN’s Theresa Waldrop contributed to this report.