In Bend, Oregon, Friday began with empty classrooms. The local school district cancelled classes across the city a day after a 16-year-old forced his way into Silver Rail Elementary School and killed three children and a teacher, leaving parents, neighbours and first responders to face what police described as the town’s darkest day.
A town keeps its children home
On Thursday night, hundreds of residents gathered at Drake Park for a candlelight vigil, and floral tributes piled up against the school sign. By Friday morning, attention had turned to the two people still fighting for their lives: a seven-year-old student and a 54-year-old teacher, both in critical condition. The children killed were aged five, eight and eleven.
The questions that will not wait
The shooting ended before police arrived. Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said a community member who saw the teenager entering the school followed him inside and shot him; officers who reached Silver Rail at 1:02 p.m., three minutes after the first 911 call, found the gunman dead. Local reporting identified the person who intervened as a parent of a student, though police have not released a name, and the governor thanked the civilian for what she called a heroic intervention that prevented further killing, according to the latest police briefings.
The weapon was a pump-action shotgun bought by the shooter’s mother, a law-enforcement official told reporters, and investigators are now examining how the teenager obtained it. Police have also not confirmed whether the 16-year-old, whose name has not been released, had any connection to the school. The FBI’s Portland office is assisting local investigators, a federal role that also surfaced this week when federal agents searched a Washington lawmaker’s DC home in an unrelated case.
The attack has also forced a hard conversation about school security. Krantz said the teenager forced entry by firing at locked doors, which held only briefly. A fifth-grade teacher, Kathy Sheil Smith, told reporters she alerted the office and moved her students into a corner of the classroom as the shooting unfolded. “Some kids were praying, some kids were consoling other kids,” she said. The violence follows other deadly shootings this autumn, including a shooting in Erie, Pennsylvania that left nine dead earlier this month.
