Three Children and a Teacher Shot Dead at an Oregon School
A sixteen-year-old forced his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend by shooting at locked doors, killing three children aged five, eight and eleven, and a teacher. A seven-year-old and a second teacher are critically injured. The gunman was shot dead by a member of the public who saw him go in and followed him inside.
The police account is unusually precise about timing. The first emergency call came at 12:59 local time from a driver who said they were being shot at by someone with a long gun; a force-wide alert went out at 13:00, the school locked down at 13:01, and the first officers arrived at 13:02 to find the suspect already dead. “An officer reported that the suspect had been shot by a community member who had seen the suspect enter the school and pursued him into the school and engaged him,” the police chief Mike Krantz said. Neither the gunman nor the man who stopped him has been named, and no motive has been given. Oregon’s governor Tina Kotek said he “heroically intervened to stop further loss of life” and added a thought for what that will cost him: “your actions carry a heavy emotional burden.” The school has more than 400 pupils and over forty staff. All schools in the district are shut today. The K-12 School Shooting Database counts at least 149 in the United States this year, against 235 in the whole of last year.