BEND, Ore. — This former timber town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains has long been known as a harmonious refuge for residents seeking a quieter, outdoorsy life of hiking, skiing, rafting and mountain biking.
The city’s biggest cultural schism was the flood of Californians who moved here in the 2000s, in what was dubbed the “Californication” of Bend.
The town has more than doubled in size since then, sparking a backlash as housing prices soared. Anti-California graffiti and bumper stickers popped up.
Still, people got along and Bend retained a laid-back quality, with good schools, a great park and trail system, craft breweries and safe streets. So safe there hadn’t been a murder in more than a year — until Thursday.
The mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School that left three students and a teacher dead, and two others injured, shattered that sense of security.
“Bend was supposed to be so safe,” said Olivia Irving, a volleyball coach who moved to Bend a few years ago from Albany in Western Oregon. “But now it feels like we’ve all been violated.”
On Saturday, a memorial in front of the Silver Rail school kept growing with bouquets of flowers three deep and a paper carpet on which students and teachers wrote messages to remember the dead.
A Lutheran group brought three golden retrievers to help comfort those who came. A high school volleyball team in town for a tournament came en masse to pay their respects to Megan Lambert, 25, who was killed on Thursday in her first job as a special-education teacher.
The tournament was canceled out of respect for Lambert, a lifelong volleyball player and coach who grew up in Bend, but the players still made the 125-mile trek from Albany to honor her.
“We all have volleyball in common,” said Megan Wallace, who coaches the volleyball team in Albany. “The volleyball team in Oregon is pretty small, so there’s one degree of separation between us and the Bend players.”
On the Deschutes River, a bronze statue of a logger on Saturday was draped in white, with a crown of flowers on top and wings. A sign in front of the statue, placed next to a group of teddy bears, read: “On Angels Wings Silver Rail Elementary.”
Friday night, an hour-long vigil in downtown Bend drew 200 people. The crowd sang “Amazing Grace,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The volunteer organizers handed out plates with votive candles.
One of the victims was Rhoam Summer, 5, the youngest child slain in a mass shooting in at least 20 years. The names of the other two students killed have not been released. They were 8 and 11.
A 7-year-old and another teacher were injured and taken to a hospital.
Bend police identified the shooter as Griffin J. John II, 16, who had attended the same school years earlier.
According to police, he climbed over a fence outside the school shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday. A man in a red truck verbally confronted him. The shooter then fired several rounds with a pump-action shotgun at the truck before the driver escaped and called 911.
The gunman then shot his way through locked doors, entered a special-education classroom and shot all four students and two of the teachers inside.
Police said a third teacher, whose name has not been released, threw a cellphone at the shooter and tackled him. While they were grappling, a parent, Kaylub Giamanco, who had followed the shooter into the school, shot him several times and killed him. Police arrived shortly afterward.
Online fundraisers on MealTrain and GoFundMe have raised over $1 million so far from thousands of donors for Giamanco and the victims’ families.
Many residents struggled to make sense of the shooting.
The city has long drawn a mix of remote workers, retirees and younger people attracted by a place surrounded by nature, with low crime and little traffic.
Morgan Parlet, who moved there with a group of friends in 2017 from Florida, said that when they stumbled upon Bend, “it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is it!’”
The city straddles the Deschutes River and is studded with Ponderosa pines and Western junipers. Now 30, Parlet, and her friends snowboard at Mount Bachelor, just 22 miles away. She said she still loves it but is haunted by the shooting.
“I will sometimes fall asleep in the park. Now I’m wondering, ‘Am I safe here?’”
Other transplants said they, too, were attracted to the city by the lack of crime.
“We came here to avoid things like this, because Southern California had so much violence and theft,” said Cynthia Wightman, who moved to Bend with her husband from Southern California 10 years ago. “Bend is an area we thought would be a lot better.”
Wightman, her husband and two children came to Silver Rail on Saturday to visit the memorial at the school. She noted that her son plays Little League on the school field, the same one where the shooter scaled a fence.
Bend real estate agent Paul Frazier, another transplant, said the city has steadily grown from a town with a church on every corner decades ago to “a pretty cool hip place with a brewery on every corner.”
Bend’s population has steadily grown to more than 107,000 people in 2025, up 8 percent from 2020 and 40 percent from 2010, according to census data. The growth has also helped boost the price of housing, which hovers around $700,000, according to Redfin.
And it’s still growing. Silver Rail Elementary School opened in 2015, and next door are new houses and townhouses for rent and sale, with dirt lots ready for construction.
“The whole vibe here is easy access to the outdoors,” said Frazier, 57, who moved to Bend three decades ago. Frazier said he has personally helped more than 200 people move here, including many remote workers, retirees and others who want to be closer to nature. Some first came to the town as tourists and decided to stay.
Once a blue-collar town, with two massive lumber mills on the river employing many men in town for almost 80 years, Bend has become increasingly upscale. The decrepit remnants of the shuttered mills were replaced and transformed into the Old Mill District that features high-end chain stores, including REI, Anthropologie and Banana Republic.
Despite some challenges with homelessness, a Portland State University survey for Bend found that 96 percent of respondents felt safe walking alone in their neighborhood during the day and more than 3 in 4 felt safe even at night.
“We don’t have keys to our house, never have had,” Frazier said. “We don’t lock our doors to home.”
Frazier said he was struck by the sounds of sirens the day of the shooting. “It’s not normal to hear sirens in Bend,” he said.
But like many communities, Bend has suffered tragedies before. In 2022, a 20-year-old man opened fire at a Safeway grocery store and killed two people before taking his own life. Over the decades, it has gone through fires and floods.
Just nothing like this, a mass school shooting that claimed so many lives, including students so young.
“Pretty much every conversation right now is about that,” Frazier said. “And you’re in shock.”
Lauren Lumpkin, N. Kirkpatrick and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.
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