By Alaa Elassar, CNN
(CNN) — On a sunny Oregon fall morning, parents dressed their children up and sent them to Silver Rail Elementary School for picture day. It’s the kind of picture parents return to years later, marveling at how small their children once were and how their smiles looked before their faces changed.
But for some families, snapshots in their minds from that morning will carry a devastating, final memory of a child who never came home.
Just hours after Steven and Angela Nuchols sent their 8-year-old daughter to school, they raced back to Silver Rail, desperate to know whether she was alive, they told local news outlet, The Bend Source.
“It was crawling with police officers from all over the county,” Angela Nuchols told The Bend Source. “You’ve got guys in tactical gear, rifles. You’re just scared to death wondering, is your child OK?”
For the Nuchols family, the next few hours before they were reunited with their daughter at a church were “the worst three hours of our lives,” Angela said.
American schools have repeatedly seen the illusion of safety shattered within the walls of their classrooms. An elementary school in Bend, Oregon, was the latest among them, when a 16-year-old opened fire on Thursday, killing three children, including Rhoam Summer, aged 5; and two others, aged 8 and 11; as well as a 25-year-old teacher, Megan Lambert, police said. A 7-year-old child and a 54-year-old teacher were injured and taken to local hospitals, according to officials.
Another school turned into a crime scene; a violation of the sanctity of childhood.
Michelle was a freshman in high school in California when she survived a school shooting in 2001. The trauma followed her into adulthood; she learned to scan rooms for exits, sit facing doors and live with anxiety and panic attacks.
Long before the shooting, every school drop-off carried a quiet dread. Michelle, who is withholding her last name for privacy, would watch her children go, a pit in her stomach, wondering whether she would see them again.
Then, on Thursday, her fifth-grade son called from Silver Rail Elementary School.
“Mom, there’s a shooter.”
Michelle was eating at an Olive Garden when her son’s voice came through his Apple Watch. She cried while recounting the moment, and said she immediately knew from the sound of his voice that something was terribly wrong.
She told him she loved him, urged him to stay quiet and hung up to call 911. As she ran to her car, the call rang without an answer. She raced toward the school, about 10 minutes away.
“I was like, how can this happen?” Michelle wonders, her voice shaking. “How can lightning strike twice?”
The first 911 call came at 12:59 p.m., after the driver of a red pickup truck saw a man approach the school, throw his long gun over the fence and climb over after it, police said Friday. When the pickup driver confronted him, the suspect opened fire, striking the truck at least three times.
From her classroom window, fifth-grade teacher Kathy Sheil Smith watched the gunman walk toward the building. She called the main office, then pulled her students into a corner.
“They were so afraid. The looks on their faces, it was really hard to see,” Sheil Smith told CNN affiliate KPTV, trying to hold back tears. “Some kids were praying, some kids were consoling other kids. But they were doing so quietly because they know you don’t make any noise.”
She wondered whether she would live to see the end of the day. What mattered to her was that her students would.
“I’m sure that every teacher at the school thought, ‘Today is the day that I am going to die,’” Sheil Smith told CNN affiliate KPTV. “Save my kids.”
As Smith tried to shield her students inside the school, a terrifying picture was emerging. Around 12:59 p.m., emergency dispatchers received a flood of calls reporting that a person had entered the Silver Rail Elementary School and started shooting, according to Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz. At 1:01 p.m., police directed the school to go into lockdown.
“Ms. Hawkins, the principal, was saying ‘lockdown, lockdown,’ and then the shots kept on going and going,” one 9-year-old student told CNN affiliate KGW, describing how he hid under a sink for 30 minutes, fearing the gunman would approach his classroom next.
“I’m pretty sure a girl. She was saying, ‘Please, please, no,’ and then it was a shot and then dead silence,” he added.
The gunman went directly into the classroom just left of the entrance and fired as many as 15 rounds, according to Krantz. The classroom was dedicated to special needs students, according to Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Steven Cook.
A second driver, a 36-year-old father whose children attend the school, had witnessed the initial shooting, drove into the school parking lot and followed the suspect into the school with his legally secured 40-caliber pistol, police said. The bystander was identified by his family as Kaylub Giamanco on Friday.
A teacher — who was not injured — threw her cellphone at the shooter and tackled him in an attempt to get the gun away from him, the police chief said. When Giamanco heard gunfire and saw the teacher physically struggling with the gunman, Giamanco entered the classroom and fired, striking the suspect multiple times and killing him, police said.
Less than half a mile away, business owner Sierra Jordan told CNN the familiar sound of children laughing and playing outside at recess gave way to the frantic arrival of ambulances.
About three minutes after the first 911 call, it was over: At 1:02 p.m., police arrived and reported the shooter had been shot and killed by Giamanco. President Donald Trump called Giamanco “a great hero” who “took care of business.”
“Had this not happened, had the bystander not neutralized the shooter? This could have been a much more tragic event than it was,” former FBI special agent Ken Gray told CNN.
The shooter was identified as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, a former special needs student at the school, Krantz said Friday. A Maverick 88 pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun was found near the suspect, who had about 44 remaining rounds of 12-gauge ammunition, Krantz added.
The gun had been purchased by his mother, a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told CNN earlier Friday.
Bend, a picturesque city of about 100,000 people, sits in the high desert landscape of central Oregon. It is a city of sage-scented air, snow-capped peaks and the Deschutes River that cuts through the heart of downtown; a magnet for thrill-seekers finding solace in the nearby mountain trails, red rock cliffs and star-filled skies.
Although the city has boomed in recent years, it remains a quiet corner of the American West where the wilderness begins just beyond the city streets and its brick front stores and breweries.
“Bend is a place that people move to from bigger cities,” Former Bend Mayor Jeff Eager told CNN. “They move here because it’s relatively safe here; they move here because we have schools you can walk your kids to,” Eager said. “You can’t imagine that it happens here.”
But against Bend’s picturesque backdrop, the aftermath looked devastatingly familiar. Parents rushing to a reunification center, hearts clenched with the hope of finding their children among the survivors. Police tape cordoned off the school as officers stood guard.
The minutes had passed so quickly for the rest of the world, but for the families waiting to learn whether their children were alive, the abrupt end of the gunfire wasn’t the end of their agony.
The prevalence of school shootings in America should prompt a conversation about “responsible gun ownership,” Democratic Rep. Janelle Bynum of Oregon told CNN.
“This school, we had invested money in to make sure that it was locked. They did all of their drills as expected — everything that we’ve said that will protect kids up to now, and yet it didn’t work,” she said.
“The laws don’t go far enough, fast enough for us to be able to intervene,” Bynum said.
“We have to stop allowing our children to be shredded in schools, grocery stores, parks, churches. We have to stop this violence.”
The Bend-La Pine school district — of which Silver Rail Elementary School is part — has multiple security measures in place such as secure entry vestibules, photo ID checks and visitor screenings, indoor and outdoor security cameras and upgraded locks on classroom doors that can be secured from inside, according to the district.
Despite those measures, some of which were upgraded in 2022, the gunman was able to force his way into the elementary school by shooting at locked doors.
It is not yet clear why the shooter was able to bypass security measures, the district’s superintendent said.
Investigators are still working to establish a motive for the shooting, authorities said Friday.
A search warrant was executed at the alleged shooter’s house on Thursday, according to a senior law enforcement official, who told CNN computers and other electronics were taken. Search warrants have also been obtained to gain access to the devices and extract data, according to the source.
Local law enforcement and the FBI will examine the material for evidence that could help explain what led to the shooting. The shooter’s parents were cooperative and told investigators their son had attended Silver Rail Elementary School during their interview, the source said.
During the pandemic, the shooter’s mother spoke with CNN affiliate KTVZ about her hopes that in-person classes would resume for children with special needs. The program was described as serving children with “intensive behavioral and social skills challenges.”
She spoke briefly with CNN off camera from her balcony on Friday but declined to comment on how her son got access to the weapon. Authorities say that is still under investigation. The woman told CNN there were no warning signs.
“I miss my boy. I’m so sorry,” the woman said as she cried and smoked a cigarette.
In a message to the families of those killed, she said: “I’m so sorry, I wish I could have done something. I’m sorry for their loss.”
Members of the Bend community gathered downtown in Drake Park on Thursday evening for a prayer vigil to support each other and grieve. Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler spoke while in tears alongside Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, who was also crying.
A large crowd of mourners held candles and hugged one another as they listened to prayers, music and community leaders. People wrote tributes in chalk. “NEVER again,” one person wrote. “Be at peace,” scribbled another. A young child knelt to place a lit candle on a step.
By Friday, a makeshift memorial had taken shape outside Silver Rail Elementary School. Bouquets of flowers, toys and red, heart-shaped balloons lined a nearby crosswalk, just beyond yellow police tape.
One mother, Ally Land, brought her children, 8 and 5, to the memorial. Her children don’t attend Silver Rail, but Land said she wanted to help them understand what had happened, answering their questions as best she could.
“I asked them what they knew, and they just said, ‘I know that school’s canceled, so that they can make school safer tomorrow,’” Land told CNN. “We told them something terrible had happened, and we just followed their questions from there.”
All Bend-La Pine Schools were closed on Friday, including activities and athletic events, the district said.
But a day without classes cannot prevent the next shooting.
The Silver Rail Elementary tragedy is the 36th shooting in the United States this year on K-12 school grounds, according to CNN’s analysis of multiple databases, including the Gun Violence Archive.
“As a country, we still lack the courage to do anything to try to prevent these things from occurring,” CNN’s Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Charles Ramsey told CNN’s Elex Michaelson on Friday. “And it’s going to happen again.”
Blake and Danielle Brinker were at their home outside Bend with Blake’s mother when they learned of the shooting, they told CNN. Blake said, describing his emotions at the time, as “just absolutely gutted.” The pair, who know people directly affected by the shooting, also visited the memorial.
“Immediately could feel the energy of the community just stop on a dime,” Blake said.
Danielle described Bend as “a very magical place.”
The town was named in the top 75 safest midsize cities in the country, according to a SmartAsset study earlier this year. But Thursday’s deadly shooting isn’t the first in Bend. In 2022, a 20-year-old gunman, a Bend resident, killed two people after walking into a grocery store with an AR-15-style rifle and opening fire.
Back in Bend, Cook, the district superintendent at Bend-La Pine Schools, spent Friday with staff at the school who are grappling with the devastating aftermath.
“They are in so much pain, as we all are,” Cook said. “This has been a terrifying and traumatic experience that will affect us all profoundly for years to come.”
Michelle, the 2001 school shooting survivor and a mother of children at Silver Rail Elementary School, carried for years the knowledge that gun violence could shatter an ordinary day without warning. But she’d hoped her children would never have to know what that’s like.
“My friend said to me, this is generational trauma, this is a second generation that’s been through school shooting trauma,” Michelle told CNN. “How sick is that?”
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CNN’s Taylor Galgano, Helen Regan, Emma Tucker, Norma Galeana, Caroll Alvarado, Alisha Ebrahimji, Amanda Jackson, Leigh Waldman, John Miller, Rebekah Riess and Elise Hammond contributed to this report.
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