Teacher and Armed Father Stop Oregon Elementary School Shooter, Four Dead

A 16-year-old former student opened fire at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon on Thursday, killing three children — ages 5, 8, and 11 — and a 25-year-old teacher named Megan Lambert, before being shot dead by an armed bystander. The attack unfolded just before 1 p.m. on picture day, when the suspect, identified as Griffin J. John II, approached the school on foot from an undeveloped wooded lot along the building's side, bypassing modern security features installed at the front entrance.

John threw a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun — registered to his mother, Shauntai May Nickerson, who lived half a mile away — over a fence and climbed after it. A passing driver in a red pickup truck verbally confronted him; John responded by firing at the vehicle, riddling it with pellets but leaving the driver unharmed. He then shot through glass doors on the playground side of the building and entered a special education classroom, where he killed four people and wounded a 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher.

Two acts of heroism cut the death toll short. A teacher in the classroom threw her cellphone at the shooter and tackled him. Outside, Kaylub Giamanco — a father of two girls at the school who had witnessed the red pickup get shot while on his lunch break — swerved onto the sidewalk and ran inside. Finding John wrestling with the teacher, Giamanco shot the teenager multiple times with a legally owned .40-caliber handgun. John died at the scene. He was still carrying 44 rounds of unused ammunition. A second special education teacher, Becky Drury, threw herself over the wounded 7-year-old girl as shots were fired; a bullet passed through Drury's arm and the child's face — both are expected to survive.

Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz praised the teacher and Giamanco at a Friday press conference, then pledged never to publicly say the shooter's name again. Investigators have seized John's electronic devices and searched his mother's apartment; Nickerson told reporters she saw no warning signs and said she would have intervened if she had. Authorities are still working to determine the shooter's motive and how he accessed the shotgun and ammunition. The school's resource officer, responsible for six campuses, was not on-site at the time.

Bend — a fast-growing central Oregon city of roughly 100,000 known for outdoor recreation — has now endured two mass shootings in four years; a 2022 grocery store attack three miles away killed two people. Nearly 200 residents sought mental health support at the main library the morning after the attack, and thousands attended a candlelight vigil Thursday night. The 7-year-old victim was airlifted to a Portland children's hospital and listed in serious but stable condition. School Superintendent Steve Cook pledged a full review of how the shooter breached a building parents believed had been upgraded specifically to prevent such an attack.