A 15-year-old girl suburban Houston girl who survived an attack in which her parents and four younger siblings were killed says she's on the road to recovery.

 

Cassidy Stay thanked first responders Saturday while speaking to a crowd at an elementary school in her hometown of Spring, the Houston Chronicle reported flower arrangement. It was her first public appearance since the shootings.

 

"Happiness can be found even in darkest of times, if one remembers to turn on the light," Stay said, paraphrasing a quote by Albus Dumbledore, the beloved headmaster of the Hogwarts school of wizards from the Harry Potter books.

 

Cassidy Stay, right, the lone survivor of a family massacre in Texas, wipes her eyes as she sits next to her uncle Drew Lyons during a community memorial at Lemm Elementary School on Saturday, July 12, 2014, in Spring, Texas.

Stay was released from a hospital Friday,  two days after the attack in which her skull was fractured by a bullet graze.

 

Authorities say her aunt's ex-husband, Ronald Lee Haskell, stormed into the family's home Wednesday and fatally shot her parents and four siblings, who ranged in age from 4 to 13 years old. They say Stay survived by playing dead and called police to warn that Haskell intended to go to her grandparents' house next.

 

"I'll be able to see them again one day alexander hera wedding," she said of her slain relatives.

 

The 33-year-old Haskell is accused killing the family members after binding them and putting them face-down on the floor of their home.

 

Haskell had a handful of previous run-ins with law enforcement in Utah, where he had lived with his wife nu skin hk. Neighbors said Haskell's marriage was so rocky that Stay went to Utah last fall to help her sister escape the relationship and start a new life in Texas.