UTHAI SAWAN, Thailand — Relatives wept and collapsed in grief over the small coffins of children Friday after a fired police officer invaded a rural Thai daycare center at naptime and massacred dozens of people. 

Thailand’s deadliest mass killing left nearly no one untouched in the small community nestled among rice paddies in one of the nation’s poorest regions. Grief also gripped the rest of the country, where flags were lowered to half-staff and schoolchildren said prayers to honor the deceased.

At least 24 of the 36 people killed in the daycare on Thursday’s horrifying gun and knife attack were children, mostly preschoolers.

“I cried until I had no more tears coming out of my eyes. They are running through my heart,” said Seksan Sriraj, 28, whose wife is pregnant and due this month, she worked at the Young Children's Development Center. 

“My wife and my child have gone to a peaceful place. I am alive and will have to live. If I can’t go on, my wife and my child will be worried about me, and they won’t be reborn in the next life,” he said.

A stream of people, including Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, other government representatives, and relatives themselves, left flowers at the daycare center on Friday. By afternoon, bouquets of white roses and carnations lined the wall outside, along with five tiny juice boxes, bags of corn chips, and a stuffed animal.

Relatives of the ones who passed later received the bodes at the local Buddhist temple. Some screamed and fainted when the small white coffins were opened. For some time, the grounds outside of the temple were crowded with grieving people.

“It was just too much. I can’t accept this,” said Oy Yodkhao, 51, sitting on a bamboo mat in the oppressive heat as relatives presented her with water and gently mopped her brow.

Her 4-year-old grandson, Tawatchai Sriphu, was killed, and she said she was worried for the siblings of the young child. The family of rice farmers is close, with three generations living under one roof.

Som-Mai Pitfai collapsed when she saw the body of her 3-year-old niece.

“When I looked, I saw she had been slashed in the face with a knife,” the 58-year-old said, holding back tears.

King Maha Vajiralongkorn and Queen Suthida were expected later in the day to go to hospitals, where seven of the 10 people wounded remain. A vigil was planned in a central park in Bangkok, the nation’s capital.

Police identified the attacker as Panya Kamrap, a 34-year-old, who was former sergeant in the police department who was fired earlier this year due to a drug charge that involved methamphetamine. An employee told a Thai TV station that the former sergeant's son had attended the same daycare but had not been present there in nearly a month.

Panya later took his own life after killing his wife and child at home.

In an interview with Amarin TV, Satita Boonsom, who worked at the daycare center, claims the staff locked the glass front door to the building after witnessing Panya shoot a child and his father out front, but the attacker shot and kicked his way through, managing to get himself into the building.

The children, mainly preschoolers, had been in the middle of taking an afternoon nap, and photos that were taken by first responders showed their tiny bodies still lying on the blankets. In some images, knife slashes to the victims’ faces and gunshot wounds to their heads were visible.

Satita claims she and three other teachers in the building climbed the center’s fence to escape and called the police and seek help. By the time she returned, the children were dead. She said there was one child who was covered by a blanket that survived the attack, apparently because the assailant assumed he was already dead.

She said the center usually held around 70 to 80 children, but there were fewer at the time of the attack because the semester had ended for the older children in the building, and rain prevented one of the school buses from operating.

“They wouldn’t have survived,” she said.

Satita added that the attacker’s son hadn’t been to the daycare center recently because allegedly he was sick.

One of the younger survivors from the attack is a 3-year-old boy who was riding a tricycle close to his mother and grandmother when Panya began slashing them with the knife. The mother passed away due to her slash wounds, and the boy and grandmother were being treated at hospitals, according to local media.

Mass shootings are rare but not unheard of in Thailand, which has one of the highest civilian gun ownership rates in Asia, with 15.1 weapons per 100 people compared to only 0.3 in Singapore and 0.25 in Japan. That’s still far lower than the U.S. rate of 120.5 per 100 people, according to a 2017 survey by Australia’s GunPolicy.org nonprofit organization.

Support and condolences came in from all around the world. “All Australians send their love and condolences,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese tweeted. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the mass killing “senseless and heartbreaking.”

Pope Francis offered his prayers for all those who were affected by such “unspeakable violence.”

“I’m profoundly saddened by the heinous shooting at a childcare centre in Thailand,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted.

Thailand’s previous worst mass killing involved a disgruntled soldier who opened fire in and around a mall in the northeastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima in 2020, murdering 29 people and holding off the security forces for about 16 hours before eventually being killed by them.

Almost 60 other people were wounded in that attack. Its death toll exceeded that of the previously worst attack on civilians, a 2015 bombing at a shrine in Bangkok that killed 20 people. It was allegedly carried out by human traffickers in retaliation for a crackdown on their network.

Last month, a clerk shot co-workers at Thailand’s Army War College in Bangkok, killing two people and wounding another before he was eventually arrested.