Daisy McCormack was shopping at Walmart Thursday afternoon when her cell phone rang.

“Mama, I’m okay,” said her 26-year-old son, Staff Sgt. Christopher McCormack.

“I said, ‘Huh?’” Daisy remembered on Friday.

“Then he said, ‘I wanted you to know I’m okay in case you been watching national news,’” she said. “And then the line went dead.”

She said her 26-year-old son arrived at Fort Hood Sunday with the 270 members of the 135th Expeditionary Sustainment Command out of Birmingham in preparation for a December deployment to Afghanistan.

“I finished shopping without panicking, and if you know me, you know that was quite a feat,” McCormack said. “Then I called my other son, who looked it up online. I said a prayer of thanksgiving and then I prayed for the others who were hurt or killed, and their loved ones.”

Christopher McCormack graduated from Athens High School in 2002. He and his wife, Rachel, live in Mobile. He has been in the National Guard for eight years.

“He joined at the end of his junior year in high school,” she said.

She said she and her husband, John, talked to their son again Thursday night.

“He was in another building when the shootings happened, but if it had happened 24 hours earlier, he would have been right in the middle of it,” she said. “But by the grace of God he wasn’t — that’s the way I think of it — but I feel so bad about the lives that were lost.”

An unidentified Alabama National Guard soldier with the 135th Expeditionary Sustainment Command from Birmingham was wounded during the shooting. Members in his unit said his injuries were not life threatening.

The 203rd Military Police Battalion deployed from Athens on Father’s Day and also trained at Fort Hood, but is already in Iraq.