Residents of Bend, Ore., like to think of their community as a small town, though this high-desert city in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains is home to more than 107,000 people and among the fastest-growing places in the Pacific Northwest.
People move to neighborhoods like the one surrounding Silver Rail Elementary School because they’re escaping something: the grittiness of Portland, Ore.; the higher prices of California; the asphalt, anonymity and poor air of urban America.
“We like to think we’re different,” said Savannah Patton, a mother of two students at the school. “Now this.”
Investigators still have numerous questions about the school shooting in Bend on Thursday, during which a 16-year-old former special education student at Silver Rail shot through a side entrance and attacked a special education classroom, killing three children and a teacher.
The police have said he used a pump-action shotgun. The gun belonged to the shooter’s mother, according to a law enforcement official who was granted anonymity to discuss details of the case.
Authorities have not explained how the teenager gained access to the gun, what motivated the attack or whether his mother or anyone else might face criminal charges.
Answers may come faster than a sense of safety can return to Bend, a former paper mill town that has been transformed over the past two decades into a hub for outdoor sports.
The Silver Rail shooting is the second recent major act of gun violence here: Four years ago, a 20-year-old carrying an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun killed two people at a grocery store a few miles from the site of Thursday’s shooting.
“My kids have been asking me, is Bend safe still?” said Jeff Eager, a former mayor of Bend. “I’m telling them, yes, it’s safe. These horrible things do happen. They happen here, and they happen elsewhere, but Bend is still comparatively, I think statistically speaking, a safe place to live.”
The school shooting broke the tranquillity in the southeast Bend neighborhood around Silver Rail, a collection of new apartments, town homes and Craftsman-inspired houses built along neat street grids around a park and the school, which opened 11 years ago. The community feels suburban, still affordable at a time when Bend housing prices are skyrocketing, and built to mimic the slower pace of small-town life in a city that has doubled in size since 2000.
“Everyone wants to be here — in some cases they’ve made sacrifices in their life to be here, so everyone is really eager to make friends and create their little villages and their friend families,” said Christy May, the parent of a kindergartner and a fourth-grader at Silver Rail who moved to Bend from Portland 11 years ago.
“I’m not going to say it’s paradise, but it’s pretty close,” she said.
Parents, she said, are almost too eager to help out with field trips and other volunteer activities. “We’ve had to literally draw names out of a hat before,” she said.
Now they’re lining up for other ways to help: Meghan Standish, a stay-at-home mom in the neighborhood, said that when she went online to sign up for a meal train to help the family of Rhoam Summer, a 5-year-old killed in the shooting, every night until Christmas was booked.
Beyond looking to help, she was debating other plans as well.
“I know a lot of friends are interested in getting their concealed carry permits after this,” Ms. Standish said. “I know I am.”
On Saturday morning, a group of dads, coffee cups in hand, straightened a roll of drawing paper left for mourners to write messages at a makeshift memorial by the school’s front entrance. A pack of teenage boys taped tissue boxes to street signs near the entrance of the school. Chickadees chirped in the park across the street and, behind the yellow police tape, children’s bicycles still crowded the school bike rack.
“It’s all so new and all so peaceful, or it was,” Ms. Patton said. “How do we get that back? Can we get that back?”
She and her husband moved to Bend from Vancouver, Wash., nine years ago because they had always loved visiting. They “just left everything,” she said, when the opportunity to relocate arose.
“I wanted to live here forever with our kids or at least raise them here,” she said. “I don’t know now.”
She was home Thursday when shotgun blasts and police sirens broke the calm. Like dozens of other parents, she ran the few blocks to the school, then spent hours waiting to find out whether her children, ages 6 and 9, were safe.
Along with the four people killed, another student and a teacher were injured in the shooting.
Police say the attack could have been far worse without the intervention of a teacher who threw her phone at the shooter and tackled him, and a father who, driving by on his lunch break, saw the attack begin, chased the shooter into the school and then shot him.
“Even the fact that you had so many people rush out there says something,” Ms. May said, noting that neighbors who didn’t have students at the school brought out coolers with drinks and snacks for parents waiting for news about their children. “The instinct here is to take care of each other.”
Neighbors say that sense of togetherness could be what gets them through the next few weeks.
Ms. Patton and friends closed off their cul-de-sac Friday night and gave the kids ice cream and glow sticks. Other neighbors held pizza parties and movie nights. At a memorial by the school’s front entrance, a middle school volleyball team announced a fund-raiser. Dozens of messages left in chalk and marker encouraged survivors to pray, heal, “hug each other” and remember: “This Neighborhood Is Love.”
Officials with the Bend-La Pine School District say students at other campuses will return to class Wednesday. Silver Rail will remain closed until further notice. Ms. May’s children have already begun asking her whether the parent-teacher conferences scheduled for later this month will take place and if they’ll still get to go to the school’s annual “trunk or treat” parking lot Halloween party.
“They have very harrowing stories about what they saw and heard, and they still want to go back,” she said. “So I want that for them.”
Grace Benninghoff contributed reporting.
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