SANTA FE, Texas — Erin Barnhart has investigated drownings, drug overdoses, car wrecks and various other deaths in her eight years as a medical examiner.

But nothing prepared her for the scene in the rear art classrooms at Santa Fe High School: overturned desks, smashed paint jars, broken ceramics and the crumpled bodies of eight students and a teacher, torn and pockmarked by shotgun shot. Another teacher was found shot and killed just outside the school building.

“I am very accustomed to seeing deceased people. It’s what I do,” said Barnhart, the Galveston County Medical Examiner who led the autopsies in the shooting. “But when you have children in their natural environment, it causes you to think about those victims a little more personally.”

She added: “It was shocking.”

Barnhart, 40, and her team of forensic investigators are part of a wide-ranging query into the May 18 mass shooting at Santa Fe High that includes local, state and federal investigators, reams of evidence and hundreds of interviews with survivors and acquaintances.

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Police say suspect Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old student at the school, opened fire with a shotgun and .38-caliber handgun inside the two-room art complex around 7:30 a.m. He exchanged gunfire with police, turned his guns on classmates, then surrendered about 30 minutes later, police said.

Eight students and two teachers died in the attack and 13 others were injured. Pagourtzis is being held in the Galveston County jail on capital murder charges.

Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset said his investigators alone have conducted more than 100 interviews. The investigation is ongoing, he said. “This is a giant puzzle where every fact we’re trying to get is one little piece," Trochesset said.

Barnhart’s autopsies are key pieces to that puzzle.

She arrived at the school at around 2 p.m. the day of the incident with two autopsy technicians, three investigators and a forensic pathologist. The school was hot — the air conditioning had been turned off after the incident — and eerily quiet, she said. Art projects still decorated the walls of the two art rooms, and the smell of acrylic paints and clay hung in the air. Scattered among the art supplies: bodies and blood in one of the art rooms and an adjoining supply closet, Barnhart said.

The juxtaposition of art supplies and slain students was jarring, she said.

“You’re in a school, it looks like a school, but all of your other sensory information doesn’t fit,” Barnhart said.

Back at her offices in Texas City, investigators carefully examined the victims, two at a time, in the small morgue located in the rear of the building. The majority of them had shotgun wounds, she said. Pathologists pulled only one .38-caliber projectile from one victim, and a few others had what’s known as “through and through” wounds, where the bullet passed clear through a body part, which were also consistent with a .38-caliber weapon, she said. Investigators counted more than 100 wounds in the 10 victims.

None of the victims had wounds from rifle rounds, leading Barnhart to believe none of the victims were inadvertently shot in the crossfire between law enforcement and Pagourtzis. Cause of death for all victims: gunshot wounds.

Barnhart and her team also were tasked with identifying the victims, which proved challenging since they had all been separated from their backpacks and purses. Using a list of students who began the day in the art classes, student photo IDs and yearbook pictures, the forensics team meticulously pieced together the victims’ identities. By Saturday afternoon, they had a good idea of who they were, and by Sunday morning all names had been confirmed, she said.

Barnhart is now finalizing the autopsy reports that will go into the official investigative file, a task that could take several more weeks.

Even when this case is behind her, she said she won’t soon forget what she saw in those two art classrooms.

“I hope I could make something good out of it, not become a worse person, a more cynical person,” she said. “But I guess that remains to be seen.”

Follow Jervis on Twitter: @MrRJervis.