A Dallas mother who was shot while shielding her son from sniper gunfireduring a Black Lives Matter protest that killed five police officers said she brought her children to the protest to show them the impact of collective action.
Shetamia Taylor, 37, told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts that she attended the protest Thursday evening with her four sons “so they could see unity and how we can come together to make a difference.”
She said everything was going well until the protest was winding down. Taylor and her boys were at a corner where police officers were standing when they heard a gunshot.
“We all just kind of looked around, officers included, not entirely sure what that was or where it was coming from,” she says. “Then the second shot rang out, and I heard the officer. He yelled out, ‘He’s got a gun.'”
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Taylor says there was a “barrage of bullets” that sounded like they were coming from “everywhere.” The family started running up the street with the boys in front of their mother when Taylor was hit by a bullet in the back of the leg.
Her son, Andrew, turned around, and Taylor covered him with her body.
“I fell on him, kind of just threw all of my weight on him to get him down into the street,” she said.
When an officer learned that Taylor had been shot, she says they “went into action.”
“They surrounded us,” she recalls. “They did for me and my son what I did for my son, and that was to protect us.”
The mother is now recovering from her injury but feels thankful that she and her family are alive.
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“As my son stated, you know, these are isolated incidents,” Taylor said of police shootings. “Unfortunately it is frequent, but we have to learn to love. We have to learn to understand that policemen and policewomen are not robots. They are human.”
“We can all get over anything if we just come together,” she added. “We all have so much more in common than I think we want to admit.”
This article originally appeared on People.com.