BEND, Ore. — The teenager who shot and killed four people Thursday at an elementary school fired into a special-ed classroom and had been a special-education student at the school himself, according to relatives of students and local news reports.
Police said the 16-year-old assailant was shot dead at the scene by a bystander. He had entered Silver Rail Elementary School by shooting at locked doors with a long gun, killing three children and a teacher, and injuring two others. Two people familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic details, identified the assailant as John J. Griffin II.
Griffin was shot to death at the scene by a man identified as Kaylub Giamanco, a person familiar with the investigation confirmed. Giamanco — a father with two kids at the school — was driving nearby when he heard gunshots and saw the shooter entering the school, a parent told The Washington Post.
Stacy Green, a grandmother of two students at the school, ages 11 and 7, said that the girls said they heard many shots from a nearby classroom and heard the special-education teacher yell out “No, please,” before more shots were fired.
Kristin Vanetsky, the grandmother of another fifth-grader, said in an interview that her grandson, Aizen, 10, was in his classroom on the second floor when the gunman blasted into the school.
“He heard so many shots they couldn’t count,” the grandmother said. Aizen was closest to the door and immediately ran and locked it, she recounted, then the students and teacher ran and hid behind the lockers in the school, which they had been trained to do in an emergency.
“My heart was beating super fast,” the boy told his grandmother in a video she took on her iPhone. Eventually the police came and led the children out, putting them on school buses.
Griffin had been a special-education student at the school in 2020, when he was 10, according to an interview with his mother, Shauntai Nickerson, in a local news article at the time. (Two people familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Post that the mother of the shooter is Nickerson. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the case that have not been made public.)
She told the news crew her son had struggled learning from home.
“I think it will be great for Griffin, because I am not certified teaching a special needs student,” Nickerson said, according to the story. “And I think it will be great for my son to get the help that he needs from the skilled teachers that he needs to get it from.”
One of the people familiar with the investigation said law enforcement officials believe the teen used a shotgun that had been purchased by his mother when he attacked the school.
Bend police said they planned to hold a news conference Friday afternoon.
Three of the people killed were children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher also died. A 7-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher also were injured and taken to hospitals for medical care, authorities said.
A local pastor, Ben Fleming, said that Giamanco — the bystander who felled the shooter — was the right-hand man to a general contractor who had done work for him last year.
Giamanco is an “unassuming” guy and “a total sweetheart” on the jobsite, Fleming said, who would patiently answer questions for his father on the house remodel.
“He was just an above-and-beyond guy,” Fleming said. “He would do the work, and then my dad would have questions, and then he would slowly walk through what he was doing with my dad, and really graciously care for my parents, which [was] kind of an extra bonus in the middle of a really stressful situation of your house being torn apart.”
The incident in the central-Oregon school in Bend — an outdoor recreation mecca about 160 miles from Portland — began just before 1 p.m. Thursday, officials said.
County dispatch received a 911 call at 12:59 p.m. “from a person in a vehicle who reported being shot at multiple times by a person with a long gun,” Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said at a news conference Thursday evening.
The school was put on lockdown at 1:01 p.m., and officers arrived one minute later to find the shooter dead.
Police said Griffin was able to penetrate the “secure vestibule” at the entrance of every school in Bend-La Pine, a district of 16,700 children in central Oregon, according to its website. Visitors are allowed to enter the vestibule but have to sign in before being electronically buzzed through doors that access the rest of the building.
In 2022, officials approved a $249.7 million district-wide security upgrade that included locks that allow classroom doors to be locked from the inside, an improvement officials said would “increase the timeliness and ease of a classroom lockdown in the event of an emergency.”
Traditionally, teachers have had to lock or unlock doors outside their classrooms with a key. It is unclear whether the changes are complete. The district’s website says the locks are “currently” being updated.
On Friday, the Silver Rail Elementary parent-teacher organization said it would be collecting donations to support impacted families.
“Our school and town are grieving an unimaginable tragedy,” the group said in an Instagram post. “We are deeply grateful for the outpouring of love and support, and especially for the teachers and staff who worked so hard to keep our children safe.” The shooting marks the 10th mass killing at an elementary or secondary school since 2006. The 5-year-old victim in Oregon is the youngest of all the people killed.
Ally Lund, 33, a Bend native, came to the school Friday morning with her own children, ages 8 and 6, to lay a bouquet of white flowers at a makeshift memorial in front of the school. Lund said her boss gave her the day off to mourn. “The community is in a state of trying to protect each other,” Lund said. “It’s about helping the families build resilience to go back to school on Monday. I can’t fathom that for them.”
Jeremy Roebuck, Lauren Lumpkin, N. Kirkpatrick, Amy Wang, Meg Kelly, Perry Stein and Razzan Nakhlawi also contributed reporting.
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