Fifteen-year-old Kristina Shevchenko, a victim of the Oregon mall shooting, recently gave ABC News affiliate KATU-TV a first-hand account of her experience on that tragic day. At first, she told KATU, she thought the shooting was part of a prank.

Twenty-two-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts armed himself with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and shot and killed two people at the Clackamas Town Center in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday, December 11. He also injured Ms. Shevchenko before turning the gun on himself.

“I didn’t even realize to run until everybody was running. There was people screaming, so everybody was running,” Ms. Shevchenko told KATU-TV.

The teenager was reportedly shot as she ran from behind a pillar and into Macy’s on the second floor of the Clackamas Town Center.

“I did feel a huge amount of pressure and pain,” she said. “You can’t describe what it feels like.”

According to KPTV, Ms. Shevchenko was rushed to the hospital where doctors at Oregon Health Sciences University removed bullet fragments from her collapsed lung and bruised liver.

In an interview with KPTV, Ms. Shevchenko discussed her struggles with survivor’s guilt

“It is hard to think that, why should they have to be the ones that weren’t able to run away. They were just passing by like all other people; why should it be that they have to be the ones that didn’t get away,” she said.

Despite the pain and suffering that Roberts brought to her and her family as well as the families of the two deceased shooting victims, Ms. Shevchenko said she “can’t exactly blame” the shooter.

“He might have had a hard life, I don’t know what his life was like or his reasons for doing what he did. I can’t exactly blame him. It only shows how prepared we have to be, and how we have to cherish every moment because you never know when it could be the last,” she said.

According to Oregonlive.com, Kristina’s family has been updating people about the teenager’s condition via Facebook. The page has earned more than 5,000 “likes” since Ms. Shevchenko was shot. A website has also been launched to help Kristina’s family cover medical expenses. So far, the website has raised $3,800 in donations.

The Oregon mall shooting isn’t Ms. Shevchenko’s first brush with death in the last few months. According to The Colombian, Kristina survived a deadly car crash in August. Ms. Shevchenko was reportedly riding in a full-size van with seven other people in Vancouver, Washington, when a Ford Ranger veered into their lane and crashed into the van head on. The crash killed the driver of the Ford Ranger, but Kristina survived.

As a result of the Oregon mall shooting and the more recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the issue of gun violence and how to prevent these tragedies from recurring has entered the political discourse. Can the solution to preventing these types of tragedies be found in new gun control laws or is the solution elsewhere?

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