Don Bainum ducked gunfire and held a dying boy in his hands.

The Santana teacher and a colleague tried to stop the blood with towels from a home economics classroom as senior Randy Gordon lay dying. Bainum kept telling the boy to hold on. There was nothing else the teacher could do.

"A good friend of mine, a Navy SEAL, said to me, 'You're one of us now. You've been shot at. You've seen someone die. It's the same for us. It's the same for you,' " said Bainum, a 1967 Santana graduate.

He went to his parish priest for solace and counseling. When he needed to take a day off from teaching, he took it.

"From my perspective, I've moved on," he said. "I'm really OK."

He keeps a folder labeled "March 5" in his classroom filing cabinet. He has looked only once at a photo album of the memorials on his coffee table at home.

Bainum thinks about the shooting every day but has held on to his sense of humor.

"I told the custodian, 'If I tell you I'm having a bad day, kick me,' " he said. "We had a bad day. There are no bad days anymore."