Youngest Sniper Victim ID'd

Dec. 12 -- On the morning of Oct. 7, Lisa Brown got the kind of news every parent dreads: Her 13-year-old son, Iran, had been shot outside his school.

"I collapsed to the floor," she recalled. "I just started saying, 'Who could have done this to my baby?'"

Iran Brown was the youngest victim of the Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks, and one of only four who survived. Hit by a single bullet moments after his aunt dropped him off at the Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md., he was critically wounded, with potentially fatal damage to half a dozen different organs.

But through a series of smart medical decisions — and fortunate circumstances — doctors at a local clinic and at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington saved his life.

"It was a miracle and it is a miracle," said Jerome Brown, the boy's uncle. "We're just very pleased that God decided to save him."

In their first television interviews, Iran's family described the harrowing day to Primetime's Diane Sawyer, and revealed the boy's name (which is pronounced EYE-rehn) for the first time. The doctors and nurses who treated him described the difficult decisions they had to make, and his remarkable recovery.

The sniper shootings terrorized the area until Oct. 24, when police arrested former soldier John Allen Muhammad, 41, and 17-year-old John Lee Malvo in connection with the attacks. The two suspects face charges in multiple jurisdictions and, if convicted, could be sentenced to death.

A Single Shot

On the morning of Oct. 7, Iran was driven to school by his aunt, Tanya Brown, because he had been kicked off the school bus the week before for eating Twizzlers.

"He told me that he was on his last bite, and the bus driver asked him to come up to the front, and they gave him three days off the bus," said his aunt, a surgical nurse. Iran lives with his uncle and aunt because their home is closer to his school than his mother's apartment.

When they reached the school, Iran got out, tossed his book bag onto a low brick wall and turned around to watch his aunt drive off. Then, at 8:09 a.m., a single shot rang out.

"I heard a scream, and then he called my name," his aunt said. "I looked back in my rear-view mirror and I saw him on the ground with his head up, looking, you know, toward the car."

Tanya Brown backed the car up and pushed open the passenger door. Iran told her he had been shot, but astonishingly managed to struggle to his feet and get back into the car, holding his chest where the bullet had hit him.