After track meets, Chris Hand, principal and coach at Dadeville High School, collects his athletes and gets them on the bus. He’s the team bus driver, too. He isn’t done with his day, he says, until he makes sure each athlete makes it home.

On April 14, the team bus arrived at their home high school around midnight after a meet in Troy. They were riding high after successful races.

“I look back at how happy they were,” Hand said. “They were proud of the team.”

Less than 24 hours later, two of those students — Philstavious Dowdell and Shaunkiva “KeKe” Smith — were dead. They were both seniors, preparing to graduate in May.

Guns are the leading cause of death for children in the country and in Alabama.

On April 15, shooting erupted at a birthday party for Dowdell’s sister. Also killed were Marsiah Emmanuel “Siah” Collins, 19, of Opelika, and Corbin Dahmontrey Holston, 23, of Dadeville.

More than 32 people were injured, authorities say. Many of them were young people, gathered from towns including Alex City, Tallassee, Tuskegee and beyond.

Ty Reik McCullough, Travis McCullough and Wilson LaMar Hill each were charged April 19 with multiple counts of reckless murder.

As word spread Saturday night and Sunday morning, Hand tried to locate his students.

“I realized that I was one of the last people from the school who saw Phil and KeKe,” Hand said. “And then, um, we found out they didn’t make it.”

Hand, in his 11th year as principal and 27th year as an educator, said nothing in his tenure had prepared him to guide a school and community through the aftermath of a mass shooting.

He said Dowdell and Smith were both successful students and athletes.

“They were just superior athletes, superior students, they wanted to do the best and they wanted the best for the school.”

Dowdell had committed to play football at Jacksonville State and also was a star track athlete and state champion.

“As good a football, basketball and track athlete as he was, he was just as good a person. He always worked hard, was humble .. all the time. He hung on every word the coaches gave him. Whatever you told him, he trusted it and did everything you asked him to do,” high school football coach Roger McDonald said.

Hand said Dowdell wanted to make sure other students had the chance to succeed, too, and made time to mentor younger students.

“He would work with the younger guys and teach them techniques, get faster, how to come off the blocks.”

Smith was dependable and committed to the team, he said. She worked as an athletic trainer. She held the team’s heat sheets and made sure each athlete was where they were supposed to be at the beginning of the race.

“I’m always at the finish line checking times, and she’s always at the front,” Hand said. “After the race, I go find her and say, ‘Are you good?’ And she always says, ‘Yeah, we’re good.’ She was always tracking people down and telling them, ‘Okay, you have five minutes, get to your spot.’ She was like an assistant coach.”

Smith played multiple sports, friends and family remembered. She loved hair and makeup and planned to go to the University of Alabama at Birmingham and become a nurse.

Dadeville High held classes the Monday after the shooting.

That morning, Hand said, he woke up and prayed Ephesians 3:20: Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.

Hand declined to say how many other students were injured in the shooting, but he and other educators are planning some hospital and home visits. He said he’s still working to figure out which schools victims attended and make sure everyone in different districts has support.

Lots of students and teachers are shaken, he said.

In Dadeville Wednesday, Kent Pulliam told AL.com that his 14-year-old granddaughter was at the party.

“I guess she just got lucky because she was in the bathroom about five seconds before it started,” Pulliam said. “She stayed in there until the last bullet was fired.”

A local elementary school made a memorial video for the students. Families are planning funerals.

“We’ll pull through, as a community,” Hand said. “But it’s just devastating that we won’t have everyone with us.”

The high school plans to hold its graduation May 22.