A 16-year-old former student opened fire in a special-education classroom in Bend, Ore., before an armed parent stopped him; Gov. Gavin Newsom urged the country to “wake up.”
By Staff Reporter
A 16-year-old former student shot his way into an elementary school in Bend, Ore., on Thursday afternoon and opened fire in a special-education classroom, killing three young boys and a teacher before a parent with a handgun shot and killed him, the police said.
The victims at Silver Rail Elementary School were boys ages 5, 8 and 11 and Megan Lambert, a 25-year-old teacher, according to the Bend Police Department. A 7-year-old girl was in serious but stable condition on Friday at Oregon Health and Science University, and a second teacher, Becky Drury, 54, suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
The police identified the gunman as Griffin J. John II, who had attended Silver Rail as a child but was not enrolled in the Bend-La Pine Schools district. The youngest victim was identified, at his family’s request, as Rhoam Summer, 5. The families of the other two children asked that their names not be released. The Oregonian reported that Rhoam was the youngest person ever killed in a mass shooting at an American school.
Three minutes
The first 911 call came at 12:59 p.m. from a driver who reported being shot at by a person with a long gun, according to the police. Investigators said the suspect had approached the fenced rear of the school from an undeveloped area, thrown his weapon over the fence and climbed onto school grounds; the driver of a red pickup truck saw him and confronted him, and the suspect fired at the truck at least three times.
The suspect then forced his way through an exterior set of double doors by shooting out the glass panes and went directly into the classroom immediately to the left, where he fired as many as 15 rounds of 12-gauge birdshot, buckshot and slugs from a Maverick 88 pump-action shotgun, the police said. All of the victims were shot in that classroom. He was carrying about 44 more rounds.
A teacher in the room threw her cellphone at him, tackled him and fought to take the gun, the police said. “She was not injured in that incident but she almost certainly helped prevent more bloodshed,” Police Chief Mike Krantz said on Friday.
A 36-year-old father whose children attend the school had seen the shooting at the truck and drove into the school parking lot. He took a .40-caliber pistol that the police said was legally secured in his vehicle, followed the gunman inside through the broken doors and, seeing the teacher struggling with him, shot him several times. Officers arrived at 1:02 p.m.
Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Steven Cook said the victims were in a special-needs classroom and that the gunman had himself been a special-needs student at the school, NBC News reported.
How he got the gun
The police said that how the teenager obtained the shotgun and ammunition “remains part of the active criminal investigation.” NBC News, citing two senior law enforcement officials, reported that his mother had bought the gun around his birthday in August and that she had been cooperating with investigators. No motive has been publicly identified. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are assisting.
“Yesterday was a terrible day for our community,” Chief Krantz said, thanking the thousands of people who attended a vigil on Thursday night at Drake Park. In her family’s statement, Ms. Lambert, a Bend native and volleyball coach, was described as someone who “always fought for the underdog and those with special needs.” Silver Rail, her family said, “was her dream job.”
A debate that crosses the state line
The shooting quickly reached into California politics. “How many more families have to live through this nightmare before something changes?” Governor Newsom said on Thursday, as quoted by Straight Arrow News. “Wake up, America. Our children deserve better than this.”
Oregon has some of the stronger gun laws in the country by the measure of advocacy groups like Giffords, which gives the state an A-minus. But Measure 114, a 2022 ballot initiative that would ban magazines holding more than 10 rounds and create a permit-to-purchase system, remains tied up in court. Gun-rights advocates argued that the state’s laws had failed to prevent the attack. “Oregon has already tried what the gun control groups demand, and so have a number of other states. It did not stop yesterday’s shooting,” said Kostas Moros of the Second Amendment Foundation, who credited the armed parent with cutting the violence short.
March for Our Lives, the youth-led gun-control organization, said: “Sorrow alone cannot be our response. We demand action, and we will not stop until the killing ends.”
For Californians, the scene in Bend carries painful echoes. In 1989, a gunman killed five children at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, an attack that led Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, to sign the nation’s first assault weapons ban, as KCRA has recounted. California law today also makes it a crime to store a loaded firearm where a child is likely to gain access to it, if the child then uses it to cause death or great bodily injury, under Penal Code Section 25100.
Those laws will be tested again in a familiar argument: whether the answer to attacks like the one in Bend lies in tighter rules on who can obtain and keep firearms, or in the kind of armed intervention that ended this one. In Bend, where the police expect to hold the school as a crime scene until at least Tuesday, families are only beginning to grieve.
