Maggie Montoya's story is one of survival, of escape from the crosshairs of a shooter who took 10 lives at a Colorado grocery store last month.
It is a story the professional runner is sharing, hoping to impact the ongoing debate over gun laws in this country.
She wants others to know what it was like inside King Soopers, the Boulder grocery store where she hid under a desk in the pharmacy, listening to the gunfire that killed a police officer, three of her co-workers and six others on March 22.
"I think being there that day, I realized that no one should be able to annihilate as many people as they want to," she told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "They shouldn't be able to walk into one safe space and be able to do that."
The 25-year-old grew up in Rogers, where her family moved when she was 9 years old. It's where she discovered running and where she excelled running track in high school.
Montoya signed with Baylor University in 2013 and piled up running accolades at the collegiate level. She moved to Boulder in 2018, where she trains with others for the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials. She has already qualified in the 10,000 meters.
Montoya came back to Northwest Arkansas recently, visiting her family as she recovers from the experience at the King Soopers market near her Boulder home.
She remembers the fear she felt as she heard the shots, how she hid in a tiny conference room in the pharmacy with a co-worker. As the pharmacist dialed 911, she called her parents in Arkansas.
Montoya would stay on the cell phone most of the hour that the gunman was in the store, texting her coach who was monitoring live feeds from the scene and could relay what was happening outside.
As Montoya told CNN's Anderson Cooper, she heard "a lot of shots" and "a little bit of screaming," then quiet except for the store music and random shots throughout the store -- and constantly ringing phones in the pharmacy.
Her co-worker silenced the calls as they came in, worried that the ringing might draw the shooter's attention. Or maybe silencing the phones would. Who could be certain?
They couldn't see into the store and weren't sure where the gunman was until he told police he was surrendering. Then, they feared he was right outside the pharmacy door. His weapons were later found there.
Montoya and her pharmacist remained hidden until the SWAT team knocked on the door and told them to knock back.
Walking out of the store, she saw the bloody footprints of the killer, then the body of a co-worker, a manager who was Montoya's age.
"That's when it just all crashed down. Like, of course, I was just nervous the whole time I was back there and really anxious and didn't know if I was going to make it out of there. But it just, it all came crashing down seeing someone I knew dead there that wasn't going to be able to walk out to her family or to walk out the store."
Montoya's account of the experience, which has been on TV and in print as well as in online posts, accomplish what she wanted. They let others feel something of what it was like to be in the midst of a mass shooting, fearing for her life and thinking the brief call to her folks would be her last.
No one would want to have been in her place or, worse, among the victims of the 22-year-old gunman who targeted that neighborhood grocery store.
Montoya is back in Boulder now, although she is uncertain about returning to work where the shooting happened or about pursuing a planned career in pharmacy.
She is running in the mountains again, training for the Olympic trials and working past that worst day of her young life.