It was around noon, and children were playing outside the school, squeezing in their last few minutes of fun before lessons began. Suddenly, there came the roar of helicopters overhead.
Bhone Tayza, 7, looked up. His cousin shouted at him to run, and both of them dashed to hide in a hole in the trunk of a tamarind tree. Then Bhone Tayza remembered he had left his school bag in his classroom and ran back to get it. Soldiers started firing rockets.
When his mother heard the school had been attacked, she said she rushed to the scene, her account of her son’s final moments largely corroborated by a teacher there. She begged soldiers to let her in. "Mommy,” she heard a familiar voice cry. A soldier allowed her into the building, where she saw her only son in a pool of blood.