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New Timeline For Uvalde, Texas, School Shooting Indicates Gunman Left In Classroom With Children For More Than One Hour Before Room Breached By Law Enforcement; Multiple Children Trapped In Classroom With Uvalde School Shooter Called 911; President Biden Will Visit Uvalde, Texas; Vice President Kamala Harris Visits Buffalo, New York, To Attend And Speak At Funeral Of Shooting Victim Of White Supremacist Gunman; Dr. Deepak Chopra Offers Advice To Those Grieving For Recent Shootings In Uvalde, Texas, And Buffalo, New York; COVID Cases Continue In States Across U.S.; Mother In Kyiv, Ukraine, Keeps Diary Of Her Experiences Of Russia's Invasion. Aired 2-3p ET.

Aired May 28, 2022 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:00:00]

JESSICA DEAN, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, everyone, and thanks so much for joining me. I'm Jessica Dean. Fredricka Whitfield is off today.

Right now, a devastated community is demanding answers, action, and accountability after a gunman entered an elementary school and murdered 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. President Biden is calling on citizens to make Americans safer as he prepares to travel to Uvalde to honor the victims tomorrow.

Meantime, heartbroken parents preparing to bury their children in the coming days as new details fuel pressing questions and prompt real concern about the police response to the school massacre.

Police officials now working to clear the record, admitting they did not confront the shooter before he entered the school despite previous claims to the contrary. We also now know that more than an hour passed between the first 911 call and the moment that shooter was killed.

CNN's Shimon Prokupecz pushed for straight answers during a press conference on Friday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: You say there were 19 officers gathered in the hallway or somewhere. What efforts were made to try and break through that door? You say was locked.

What efforts were the officers making to try and break through either that door or another door, to get inside that classroom?

COL. STEVEN MCCRAW, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY: None at that time.

PROKUPECZ: Why?

MCCRAW: The on-scene commander at the time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject.

PROKUPECZ: Sir, you have people who are alive, children who are calling 911, saying please send the police. They are alive in that classroom. There are lives that are at risk. That's not protocol, is it?

MCCRAW: We're well aware that.

PROKUPECZ: Right. But why was this decision made not to go in and rescue these children?

MCCRAW: Again, the on-scene commander considered a barricaded subject and that there was time, and there were no more children at risk.

Obviously, obviously, based upon the information we have, there were children in that classroom that were at risk, and it was in fact still an active shooter situation and not a barricaded subject.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DEAN: The incident commander has been identified as Uvalde school district police chief Pedro "Pete" Arredondo. Arredondo made two brief statements to the press on the day of the shooting but has not spoken publicly since. A top official says Arredondo made the wrong call.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COL. STEVEN MCCRAW, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY: With the benefit of hindsight, where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period. There is no excuse for that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DEAN: When President Biden travels to Uvalde tomorrow he's going to meet with victims' families and other community members there. CNN's Adrienne Broaddus joins us now live from Uvalde. Adrienne, how is the president expected to spend the day tomorrow?

ADRIENNE BROADDUS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good afternoon to you. President Biden is expected to meet with the families who are represented by the crosses on the lawn of the school behind me. He will hear from those families and hear from them.

And when the president tells those families that he understands what they are going through, he means it. This is personal for President Biden. He, too, has had to bury his own child.

He will also meet with leaders throughout the community. As you know, this is a community facing scrutiny, because with each news conference, the story altered. And here in this town, not only members of the community but parents and families are upset.

Let me tell you a little about the town. It's a close-knit community. And I know we hear that cliche repeated over and over, but this is a town where everyone knows everyone. Members of law enforcement are linked to children who also go to this school.

One of the two teachers posted on her bio on the school's website that she was married to a member of law enforcement. So this is a community that is hurting, especially after hearing that 911 timeline.

I want to go over that timeline that was revealed to us yesterday. And there was a warning from the director of the Department of Public Safety when he laid out that timeline, saying it was better for him to read it than allow us, the media, to hear it.

The first call came around 11:30. It was from a panicked teacher. Soon after, at 12:03, a caller inside of the school who said she was in room 112 called, whispering, asking for help. She followed up multiple times over the next hour, calling the 911 dispatcher.

At one point she said at least eight to nine people are still alive. And this is key, it's critical. This child was letting the dispatcher know that there was still hope.

[14:05:04]

And then later another caller called. And when that caller called, it could be heard over the 911 line, gunshots, gunshots had been fired. And then when that first child called again, she said please send help now.

And it took at least an hour and 20 minutes past from the time of the initial call before that 18-year-old shooter was killed.

And this is raising a lot of questions. People were already hurting, as these families prepare to bury their children. But now they're asking, what took so long?

Why didn't the members of law enforcement who were in the hall or wherever they were go inside to stop the threat?

DEAN: Adrienne taking us through that devastating timeline, thank you so much for your reporting there in Uvalde.

And joining me now to discuss this is Juliette Kayyem. She's a CNN national security analyst and she also served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. Juliette, great to see you, thanks for making time.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Of course.

DEAN: We just listened to Adrienne. And I know that timeline. We started hearing all of these details yesterday.

And it is still so many people are just shaking their heads, and we know that officials in Uvalde have acknowledged that the commander made the wrong decision.

You've called this an abject failure. What happened here? Does this just come back to training? KAYYEM: No, because the training is actually the opposite. This is

the weird thing about it. If the training had said, we'll stand by and weigh all the factors and see who's alive and who's dead, then you would just say he made a bad judgment call, right. In other words, he just calculated the risk.

The training that they received, and we know this now, they've received active shooter training over the last couple of years. I think the most recent was just several months ago.

The active shooter training is absolutely clear, no ifs, ands, or buts. You have an active shooter, that shooter is denied any privileges of understanding him, of trying to figure out what he wants, of hostage-taking, anything. You go in and you eliminate the threat.

We know this now. And so that's beyond horrifying. But the frustrating thing about this is that -- it's the training was there. It's just the capacity and the will, and I think -- and ability and competency.

And did he freeze, did he -- what was he thinking, is going to be the hardest thing to ever answer, even if we now have some explanation of why they were sitting outside.

I will say one thing. For the other men to stand there for an hour, there's going to be a big question about whether they should have just ignored those orders. They're closer, they're by the door, they're hearing what's going on.

And sometimes you have a duty to disobey. And I just keep thinking about, why didn't anyone, knowing, seeing, hearing what was going on in that room, just disobey the orders?

DEAN: Right, and I do think that's been something that's come up when I've been talking with people about it, and we've been discussing it here on the air, a duty to disobey, that obviously law enforcement works with a chain of command.

But at that point, again, as someone who has not worked in law enforcement, it would seem to me you can go ahead and sort through that later.

KAYYEM: Right. I've talked to a bunch of -- yes, I've talked to a bunch of former colleagues. We're all sort of -- we don't get it, because this is, as I've been saying the last couple of days, this is so -- I hate to say easy, but this is a calculation that you actually don't need much thought about.

We know, active shooter, eliminate the threat, period. There's nothing else you actually need to think about because all the other problems will cure themselves, so to speak, once you eliminate the threat.

So why weren't others, and this is I think the big question, you have a duty to disobey if you're just sitting there and something is wrong.

And one of the challenges of chain of command is that there's an obedience factor to it, because that's actually how it works.

But a number of people I've talked to who have been in those situations, which I haven't, who have been in those situations would say, you would just know, your judgment would tell you.

And I have to say this is common in disaster management or crisis management. You do anticipate a certain amount of pivoting and fluidity because the people closest are going to have better judgment calls.

Almost every disaster response will have an element of sort of disobedience, so to speak.

And it's sort of unfathomable to me. And I think the story we don't quite know yet -- this story will change, I'm quite confident of it, just given how the information has come out, is in fact the moment of entry and shooting, as that clearly was some form of disobedience, and whoever is going in and shooting him as he should have been shot an hour before clearly just decided that the chain had to be broken.

[14:10:13]

DEAN: And a father of one of the children who did die in the shooting has said someone should be held accountable for this time that it took officers. How does an investigation proceed forward? How does that work?

KAYYEM: I think right now -- so normally you would have an after- action report or a lessons learned report. But I've never experienced really sort of epic Katrina-like mistakes are going on here.

So you would want an independent entity to come in. The locals don't have the capacity, as we now know, the expertise, and they're also, as we now know, were protecting themselves in the narrative.

I think the state, as I've been saying the last couple of weeks, especially with the governor's sort of clear and -- he got out so in front of the facts, I don't think the state has the capacity to do this.

You can imagine a separate entity, maybe another part of the state apparatus could do it, or a federal entity, the FBI. But you'd would want an independent review.

There will be -- we know it now. There's going to be lawsuits. This wasn't a bad call. It was negligence of tragic proportions and dereliction of duty, so to speak.

We arm -- we train law enforcement, and it's a quid pro quo, right? In other words, you can't get the guns and act a certain way and be a certain way, and then when the moment when kids armed with crowns and paper need you to rush in, you're not willing to do it.

So that's what we would -- ideally you would want that kind of independent review to go in. And you can even imagine, I'm throwing this out here if anyone will listen, but the International Association of Chiefs of Police or the Domestic Organization of Chiefs of Police, you'll get a separate entity in there that's not political that can answer questions, focus blame where it needs to, but also make us realize that you can arm 19 men, and if they don't act, it's going to -- children will still die. And then the root causes of why this is happening are not being addressed, which we know what it is. It's the guns.

DEAN: Right, and before I let you go, just quickly to follow up on that, do you think that there will be charges or could there be charges filed against the commanding officer in this incident?

KAYYEM: Yes, I think they are somewhat protected in some ways. So there's going to be a gross negligence standard, which is sometimes hard to achieve.

But most of these cases settle with some sort of -- have some sort of civil lawsuit that eventually gets settled. We've seen that in many of these school cases.

I've never seen -- as most of our experts are saying, we've never quite seen anything like this because of the horror of just imagining that hour when, again, the training is clear.

So this wasn't -- this wasn't that the training was bad and the person didn't act. The training was clear, and he violated, or did not implement the training that everyone has known to do for the last 20 years.

It's eliminate the threat, it's like you don't even think about it, you're just eliminating the threat.

DEAN: Juliette Kayyem, thank you so much, we appreciate it.

KAYYEM: Thank you. Thanks.

DEAN: And the end of the school year is supposed to be a time of celebration, of course. But in Uvalde, 21 families now preparing for funerals. Boris Sanchez tells us what we've learned about some of the victims.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

SANCHEZ: Three days after 21 innocent lives were taken, we're learning more about the loved ones this small town is grieving.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Don't forget them, please. Do something about it, I beg you.

SANCHEZ: Miranda Mathis was 11 years old. A friend of her mother's told "The Washington Post" Miranda was a fun, spunky, bright little girl. Ten-year-old Rogelio Torres, his aunt telling CNN affiliate CSAT he was a, quote, "very intelligent, hardworking, and helpful person.

He'll be missed and never forgotten." Maite Rodriguez, also 10 years old. Her mother Ana says Maite dreamed of becoming a marine biologist and wanted to attend college at Texas A&M. In a touching Facebook tribute, Ana calls her daughter, quote, "sweet,

charismatic, loving caring, loyal, free, ambitious, funny, silly, goal-driven," and her best friend. Other victims' names have also been confirmed.

[14:15:00]

Layla Salazar, 11 years old, Makenna Lee Elrod, Alithia Ramirez, and Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, all just 10 years old.

And in a tragic twist, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of the murdered teachers, has also died. According to the archdioceses of San Antonio, Joe Garcia suffered a heart attack after news of his wife's death and passed away on Thursday.

The couple had been married more than 24 years and were high school sweethearts.

EDUARDO MORALES, SACRED HEART, UVALDE: They came to mass every Sunday.

SANCHEZ: Father Eduardo Morales of Sacred Heart Church in Uvalde knew the family well and greeted Irma as she walked into service on Sunday morning. He says the couple were a fixture in the community and leave behind four children who he privately consoled shortly after Joe's death.

MORALES: I told the community that in my own family when we've had a death, that it's the church and prayer that has gotten us through all this, not that it takes the pain away.

SANCHEZ: The Garcias among a list of names of lives cut too short. Eva Mireles, Amerie Garza, Uziyah Garcia, Xavier Lopez, Jose Flores Jr., Lexi Rubio, Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, Jacklyn Cazares, Tess Mata, Nevaeh Bravo, Ellie Garcia, Jailah Silguero, Elijah Torres, names that will forever be etched in the memories of those touched and affected by this horrible tragedy.

GEORGE RODRIGUEZ, GRANDFATHER TO JOSE FLORES JR.: Show them to the state, the nation. Show them to the world. I want everyone to know him. When he died, I died part with him.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

DEAN: Boris Sanchez, thank you for that.

We're going to have much more from Uvalde, Texas, ahead as we continue to learn new details about the 21 innocent lives lost in that massacre, 19 children and two teachers. Much more straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:21:13]

DEAN: Millions of Americans are starting their summer this weekend with a getaway or maybe a big family get-together. But the CDC wants to remind people COVID has not gone away.

Right now more than 55 percent of Americans are in a location with a medium or high COVID community level. Let's bring in Dr. Megan Ranney to talk about this. She's an emergency physician and academic dean of public health at Brown University.

Great to see you, Doctor. Thanks for being here. Walk us through how we can stay safe in this current uptick. The good news is we know a lot of things that we can do now.

DR. MEGAN RANNEY, ACADEMIC DEAN OF PUBLIC HEALTH AT BROWN UNIVERSITY: Right, it is the same things that we have been doing throughout this pandemic, right? The first thing is, get vaccinated if you haven't.

Get your first booster if you haven't. And if you're in that older age group, age 50 plus, get your second booster. That is the very best thing that you can do to prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and long COVID.

The second thing is, if you don't want to catch COVID, wear a high- quality mask when you are indoors with large groups of people. Here at my own university, at Brown, we're currently celebrating commencement.

We put a mask mandate back in place this weekend. Students haven't been on campus for a couple of weeks, but with so many people being here, we don't want any of our indoor events to turn into super- spreaders.

And so that's the caution that I give to Americans. If you're doing these indoor events and not wearing a mask, you have to expect that you are most likely going to come down with COVID.

Those vaccines will prevent you from the worst part of it, though.

DEAN: Right, that's right, that's right.

And I want to turn the conversation now to Uvalde and the mass shooting there this week. You were the focus of an article in "The Atlantic" that looked at a new model for handling gun violence.

And for starters, let's just kick it off here, do you see gun violence as a public health crisis?

RANNEY: This is the definition of a public health crisis. We have seen firearm injuries increasing inexorably across the United States for about a decade now.

And we've had a significant increase over the past two years. Gun homicides, gun suicides, and, sadly, now that schools are reopened, school shootings as well are all going up.

We need to take a different approach to stopping it. What we have been doing for the last 10, 15 years clearly is not working and is even making it worse.

So applying those standard public health tools that we have used time and time again to prevent injury, prevent illness before it happens, is really the best and only path forward for us right now.

We can keep having the same arguments and we're going to keep seeing gun deaths rise. And I will tell you, as a mom and as an E.R. doc, I'm not willing to stand for it.

DEAN: And in that article you say, quote, "Core to public health is the idea that you have to think on a larger scale, not just about the patient in front of you, but also the individual and population level risk factors."

If gun violence is treated as or labeled as a public health crisis, how do you believe that would change things?

RANNEY: So once we label it as a public health crisis, we of course have to keep talking about the gun. Someone who is compulsive or filled with hate or filled with sadness and picks up a gun has a higher chance of killing themselves or killing someone else.

But it's also about going backwards, about thinking about what got to that person to that point where they were ready to misuse a gun, and how do we change the trajectory.

And I'm going to give you a couple of examples because that can seem really abstract. Boys' and girls' clubs have been shown to decrease the level of gun violence in their communities.

Putting in gardens in vacant lots has been shown to decrease the amount of gun violence in communities.

[14:25:04]

And having simple discussions about recognizing if you have an elderly parent or a loved one who is showing signs of depression or dementia and reminding you to lock up that gun safely, that can decrease rates of gun suicide.

There are a lot of interventions that we can do way before we get to this horrible moment when we're trying to get police to run into a school to stop it that can help change the trajectory and bend the curve, the horrible curve that we are on.

DEAN: It's so interesting to hear you talk about really meeting this really early, right, like making sure that children have a place to go, that they feel seen, that they have a community around them, that that can make a big difference along with all the other things being discussed right now.

RANNEY: That's right. There are folks who are so focused on the mental health crisis of children in our country right now, and then we want to blame that for the rise in gun violence.

They are two separate things, but if we want to treat mental health, if we want to talk about a link between mental health and guns, let's provide resources to treat people's loneliness, anxieties, depression, both long before anything bad happens and to help all of us heal in the wake of these repeated tragedies. It really is about going upstream in the same way that we do to

prevent heart attacks or to prevent car crash deaths, using those same tried and true techniques for this very real health problem.

DEAN: Dr. Megan Ranney, thank you so much, we appreciate it.

RANNEY: Thank you.

DEAN: Still to come this hour, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveling to opposite corners of the country this weekend as they honor and mourn the victims of the latest mass shootings in America. We'll have their plans in Buffalo and Uvalde. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:31:21]

DEAN: In Buffalo, New York, today, the second family attended a memorial service for Ruth Whitfield, who was one of 10 people killed at a mass shooting at a grocery store two weeks ago. And moments ago, Vice President Harris spoke about how violence is hurting our nation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS, (D) VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We have an epidemic of hate where people are being targeted just because of who they are. I think we all have to stand back and say, wait, enough.

Enough is enough. A harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. No one should be left to fight alone. And we've got to deal with this, and we have to deal with it in a number of ways.

But I went through it even at the church. You look at it, everything from Buffalo to what's happened just with those babies and the teachers being killed in Texas, the funerals haven't even really begun in terms of mourning that loss.

We're looking at, on the heels of Atlanta just a year ago, Orlando, the Tree of Life. We have to agree that if we are to be strong as a nation, we must stand strong, identifying our diversity as our unity, and that anyone who is trying to break that down is hurting us as a country and as individuals who should identify as one as a country, as Americans.

So I think of it in a number of ways. There is the tragedy of the personal loss that each of these families has faced. Mrs. Whitfield, the funeral today, what a beautiful woman who lived an extraordinary life.

I met with the other families. There were community leaders. There was a father of an infant. And then, of course, the president is going to go tomorrow to Texas and be with the families who have lost their babies at a school.

We have to -- everybody's got to stand up and agree that this should not be happening in our country, and that we should have the courage to do something about it.

On the issue of gun violence, I will say, as I've said countless times, we are not sitting around waiting to have the what the solution looks like. We're not looking for a vaccine. We know what works on this.

It includes, let's have an assault weapons ban. Do you know what an assault weapon is? Do you know how an assault weapon was designed? It was designed for a specific purpose -- to kill a lot of human beings quickly.

An assault weapon is a weapon of war, with no place, no place in a civil society.

Background checks, why should anyone be able to buy a weapon that can kill other human beings without at least knowing, hey, has that person committed a violent crime before? Are they a threat against themselves or others? That's just reasonable.

That's just reasonable. We do that, saying you have to have a license to drive a car. You have to be of a certain age to buy a six-pack. We are a society that is governed by rules, most of which were designed, those rules, to, at the very height of the purpose, prevent against harm, to promote safety, and to have a common order that we all agree a civilized society should agree to that ensures there will be safety and will prevent chaos.

[14:35:05]

When we've had over 200 mass shootings in our country already and we are barely in June, let's all agree, we've got to do something that's within our power to do it. Congress needs to act, and what I know is that we also have to come together as one nation, undivided, standing with each other.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If Congress doesn't act --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DEAN: And that was Vice President Kamala Harris preparing to leave Buffalo where she ended up speaking at the funeral of one of the victims from the Buffalo shooting, Ruth Whitfield.

I want to bring in Joe Johns who is in Buffalo. Tell us more, Joe, about how the vice president honored this remarkable woman.

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Right, and you really have to sort of emphasize that, because she is a remarkable woman, came from a remarkable family, 86 years old, the oldest person killed in that grocery store in that shooting two weeks ago today.

And also important to say, her son, former fire commissioner, also spoke. A touching, touching service, if you will.

In the middle of that, important to say, the vice president was not supposed to speak. That was the guidance when she was on her way up here to this memorial service, that she was not going to speak at least at the memorial service.

But it all changed when Reverend Al Sharpton, who was delivering the eulogy, decided that he was going to break protocol, despite the fact that the vice president had told him she didn't want to make this a political event.

He said -- and he called on her to speak. And she reiterated some of those things I think you heard from her at the airport. But just listen to part of what the vice president had to say at this memorial service.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS, (D) VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is a moment that requires all good people, all God-loving people, to stand up and say we will not stand for this. Enough is enough.

We will come together based on what we all know we have in common, and we will not let those people who are motivated by hate separate us or make us feel fear.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHNS: The vice president also took flowers over to the grocery store, the scene of the crime two weeks ago today, and is now on her way back to Washington, D.C. Back to you.

DEAN: Horrific, horrific crime. Joe Johns, thank you so much.

Still ahead, as the nation struggles following the mass shooting in Uvalde, how can we cope and heal after such a horrific event? We're going to talk about that with Dr. Deepak Chopra. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:42:25]

DEAN: There is no question these are challenging times in America right now. Rising costs for everything from groceries to gas, a critical shortage of baby formula, a pandemic that won't go away, and the absolute horrors of yet another mass shooting, this time claiming the lives of 21 innocent people, 19 of them young children in their classroom.

I want to turn now to Dr. Deepak Chopra. He's the founder of the Chopra Foundation and Chopra Global. And Doctor, it's lovely to see you.

People are kind of at a loss, I think, right now. They feel really overwhelmed. And they are just so, so broken over what we're seeing, especially in in Uvalde. How do we cope with this? DR. DEEPAK CHOPRA, FOUNDER, THE CHOPRA FOUNDATION: So first of all,

Jessica, nothing I can say, nothing I can say is going to offer consolation to those immediately affected.

And actually, those of us who are not so immediately affected, we're all grieving, and we have to get in touch with our grief. If we resist our grief, then it only will persist. So this is a time for collective mourning.

But at the same time, deeper understanding is needed. It's obvious that we have the most outrageous, insane gun laws in the world. There have been mass shootings in Australia and Tasmania many decades ago, in Scotland.

And they instituted gun reform. There hasn't been a single mass shooting after that. In our country, 188 mass shootings in schools alone in the last couple of decades. So if we don't think this is insane, then we are declaring our own insanity.

Having said this, there are deeper reasons for this kind of trauma, and it's recycling of trauma. It's even genetic and epigenetic, which means intergenerational trauma recycles as anger and hostility, which is really the memory of pain.

Fear, which is the anticipation of pain and trauma. Guilt, shame, humiliation, which is directing the blame at yourself. And then depression, which causes a depletion of energy.

And unless we address the fact that we are a traumatized society, and there are long term solutions to this which includes looking at mental illness, because no one shoots like this until they're mentally unwell.

[14:45:00]

But having -- saying that is not enough. We have to first act on gun reform. And there are special interest groups who keep this alive in the name of the Constitution while they deprive women of their constitutional rights at the same time.

So everyone who is listening, every citizen should immediately act and speak to their legislators and never elect an official who actually supports guns and the way they are sold right now.

A 13-year-old will be refused cigarettes and alcohol and racy magazines, but can get an assault weapon without even being asked to show their credentials.

DEAN: And I hear you, at the beginning of your answer there you talked about how people should get in touch with their grief, that you can't suppress it.

So is that -- are you telling people, let yourself feel these things, don't push it to the side, don't look at the phone and scroll more?

CHOPRA: No, you have to feel your grief, and grief is in the body. So you get in touch with the sensations in your body. You feel the grief.

You release it whatever way you can release it, including crying and sobbing and meditation and prayer, all these things help. And we need to do this collectively.

There are many online resources, so you can find these. And we are also offering these online resources both at Chopra Global and Chopra Foundation.

DEAN: And I know you've long been committed to this idea, this principle of love in action. Before I let you go, what does love in action look like in Buffalo and Uvalde right now?

CHOPRA: Do something about it. Do something. Vote the necessary changes that you need to vote, but also support each other through attention, which is deep listening, affection, deep caring, appreciation, deep gratitude for each other, and acceptance of each other.

And these are what I call the four A's, because love without action is meaningless, and action without love is irrelevant. When you have love in action in your heart, then the whole world will support you.

DEAN: Dr. Deepak Chopra, thank you so much for those words, we appreciate it.

CHOPRA: Thank you, Jessica. Take care.

DEAN: You, too.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DEAN: Tomorrow night, CNN takes an intimate look at the war in Ukraine through the eyes of a mother who was caught inside a Kyiv basement with her family as the war rages around her Sunday night on "AC 360" with Anderson Cooper. Anderson?

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Jessica. We've all seen a lot of images of the war in Ukraine, but this is something you really haven't seen. It's the war through the eyes of one mother as she shelters in a basement with her three children in Kyiv.

Her name is Olena Gness, and before Russia invaded, she was a tour guide and posted a lot of videos about her family and about life in Ukraine on YouTube.

But when the bombs started falling and Russia invaded, she decided to keep a video diary of what she and her husband and kids were experiencing as they moved into this basement shelter, really never knowing if they would survive through the night. I talked to her on "360" since the early days of the war and was able to finally meet her just a few weeks ago in Kyiv.

But when I realized how much video she had shot and I started to watch it, I started to realize what an extraordinary thing this was. It's a view of war that we've rarely seen before.

It's very intimate and poignant, it's very personal. And she's just lovely and a thoughtful, caring person. This is the war diary of Olena Gness. Here's a brief clip.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: In the morning, against all odds, Kyiv is still in Ukrainian control.

OLENA GNESS: So the latest update is that we are alive. I am alive. This is arena. This is Derina (ph). She's sleeping on the floor.

There's some other people in the shelter. Woke up, it's already morning, it's like more than 7:00 in the morning. They are sleeping over here. It's very important that we survive to face the night. Now the day has come.

At night everything looks much more scary for people. So, as you can see, even many people have left the bomb shelter right now, because it's more than 7:00 in the morning.

COOPER: Many in Kyiv are leaving. Long lines of cars clog the roads heading west. Train stations around the country fill with families trying to get out. Olena decides she and the kids will stay.

GNESS: I feel safe here. The chances for us to die here in Kyiv are equal to the chances for us to die on the road. So we're -- and another thing. I want my children to be alive, of course, but both physically and spiritually. I want them to be strong. I want them to be free.

COOPER: Olena's husband, Sirhay (ph), brings supplies for his family. He's volunteered to fight despite having no military training.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Daddy, what are you doing today?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): I can't tell you, Katya. Bye.

COOPER: He leaves quickly to rejoin his unit.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mom, where is daddy going?

[14:55:20]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Mom, I want to go to daddy.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Where did daddy go?

GNESS (through translator): He went to defend us.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To War?

(END VIDEO CLIP) COOPER (on camera): Her family, like so many others, have been through so much. And it's given them great strength to know that the world is watching what happens in Ukraine. I really hope you can watch this Sunday night. I think you'll come away seeing the war through her eyes in a whole new way. Jessica?

DEAN: Anderson Cooper, thanks so much.

"A Mother's Diary of War" airs tomorrow night at 8:00 p.m.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm Jessica Dean in for Fredricka Whitfield. CNN Newsroom continues after this break. Have a great day.

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