LAWRENCE -- Four young boys in full cardiac arrest at the scene.

Three arrive at Lawrence General Hospital with hands still pumping their chests in an effort to restart their hearts. Two have body temperatures below 80 degrees.

Ambulances bring in another three boys, all suffering from hypothermia but breathing.

Six boys, five minutes. That's what faced Dr. Michelle R. Harris and her emergency room staff yesterday.

In the end, two of the boys would go home, one would stay overnight, and three would later die at Boston hospitals.

Another boy would die at Holy Family Hospital in Methuen.

"I think having three people in such a situation all at once, I have never seen ..." said Harris hesitating. "I don't even know how to put it ... I never seen a mass casualty trauma like this."

With the emergency room in a "trauma stat" mode, Harris said, teams of at least four and five doctors and nurses got to work on the three most critical patients. Their priority -- get the boys' temperatures up, says Harris.

Harris described the process -- resuscitation continued while tubes in the boys' chests and abdomen pumped in warm saline solution in an effort to warm the boys from the inside. The boys' ventilators blew warm air into them. This went on for an hour to two hours, Harris said.

Little boys -- all the victims were little boys, a fact that drove the teams more, Harris says.

"I think it's a whole adrenaline -- one, because they are kids, two, we take care of adults like this everyday," she said. "You don't see kids like this everyday."

But the sadness of working so long on little kids without heartbeats is something the teams must forget in the ER.

"You completely remove yourself emotionally from it when it happens," Harris said.

"You don't experience the emotional part of it until afterward."

"Afterward" is when emergency room workers start feeling the shock and sadness, Harris said. The inevitable self-second-guessing comes next, she said -- "Did I do everything I could?"

As for Harris, still winding down from the events, "I am OK. There's a lot of support."