A teen gunman killed three children and a teacher at Silver Rail Elementary Thursday. School and law enforcement say some security measures in place helped slow him down and may have prevented further bloodshed.
Silver Rail Elementary’s exterior fence — which alerted drivers to the shooter before he entered the school — and the school’s locked doors all helped to slow the shooter’s entry to the school, said officials. Human intervention also slowed and ultimately stopped the shooter, as a teacher in the classroom threw a cell phone at him and fought with him and a Samaritan followed him into the school and killed him.
The teenage gunman shot his way into the school Thursday afternoon, killing three children and a teacher and wounding two others before being shot himself by a parent.
The shooter arrived on foot to the school, approaching from an undeveloped lot across the street. He had a visible weapon. A driver confronted him from the street, and the shooter fired multiple times at the man’s car before throwing his gun over a school fence and climbing it himself. The driver moved further down the street and called 911.
The shooter did not go to the main entrance, which has the only unlocked door in the school during school hours. The shooter instead targeted another entrance, which was locked. The shooter fired multiple rounds into the glass of a double set of doors on the side of the building to enter. Once in the hallway, he went directly into the nearest classroom on the left, where the shooter had taken classes years earlier. All the victims were shot in that classroom.
Officers and medics arrived within 3 minutes from the initial 911 call to attempt lifesaving measures on one injured boy. Two other boys and Megan Lambert, a teacher, were dead when officers arrived. Roughly 150 officers and first responders were involved in the investigation by Friday, according to a Bend Police press release.
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“Hundreds of officers responded within three minutes,” spokesperson Sheila Miller said.
Every Bend Police officer, including those handling office work, responded to the shooting, she said.
It can be difficult, however, to balance the horror of loss with the feeling that things could have been worse.
“There’s a lot of pain, but there’s also a lot of support,” Superintendent Steve Cook told The Bulletin on Monday. “The city, the region, quite frankly, is really sending out a lot of positivity. But there’s a lot of pain.”
Slowing him down
School and law enforcement say some security measures helped slow the shooter and prevented further bloodshed.
One was the perimeter fencing around the school, and another was the locked side door the shooter targeted to enter the school.
“That matters — having locked doors. It didn’t prevent (the shooter’s) entry, but it slowed entry,” Cook told The Bulletin Monday. “Having perimeter fencing didn’t stop entry, but it slowed entry and it also created a visual trigger for somebody to see something and then to call 911 and say somebody just hopped the fence from the road.”
Cook said one teacher’s action to fight the shooter helped save lives, as did the person who called 911 and the man who followed the shooter into the school.
“You have kind of three choices: Run, hide, fight in that moment. And they chose to fight,” he said. “I think that those actions save lives. Those are the kinds of things that you can look at.”
The district will perform an after-action analysis on the shooting, said Cook.
Looking ahead, officials and the community have to consider how to further protect children in schools. A community member started an online petition to have resource officers in every school.
“The question about what it would take to prevent entry versus slowing down entry … the conversation is how far do you want to go?” he said. “Could we have made the fencing harder to get over? Could we have put razor wire on top of the fencing, for example? Yes, we could. But is that what we would choose to put in our schools? Maybe now that’s a conversation we want to have and our community wants to have.”
Police training
Officials said all Bend Police officers went through a full day of active threat training at Mountain View High School in August. These trainings are done periodically at a number of locations, said police spokesperson Sheila Miller, including Mt. Bachelor, Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center and more.
The driver who confronted the shooter from his car called 911 at 12:59 p.m. An alert tone was pushed out to all police officer radios at 1 p.m., indicating a critical incident, said Miller. The alert is loud and supersedes all other calls and alerts.
Officers directed the school to go into lockdown at 1:01 p.m. Officers arrived at 1:02 p.m. and an officer reported moments later that the shooter had been shot multiple times.
“They all got there as fast as possible to enter the building and prevent further loss of life,” she said.
Silver Rail Elementary does have a part-time school resource officer who is an employee of the Bend Police Department, though he was at a neighboring school when the shooting happened. That employee splits their time between seven schools, said Miller.
Security measures in place
At Silver Rail, the school’s main entrance is the only unlocked door during the school day, and visitors are brought into a locked vestibule to be vetted before entering the rest of the school. The doors and glass in the vestibule is safety glass, which is shatterproof — made by bonding multiple layers of glass with a flexible plastic or resin interlayer, so glass shards stick to the plastic — but is not bulletproof. Silver Rail’s secure vestibule received upgrades in 2020, said district spokesperson Scott Maben.
Silver Rail Elementary was the first school in the district to have a security vestibule at the main entrance when it opened in fall 2015, said district officials.
Silver Rail had updated door locks that locked easily without a key and were consistent across the district.
In November 2022, after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Deschutes County voters approved spending nearly $250 million to improve security and modernize aging schools with the 2022 construction bond. That bond included altering 3,200 doorways across the district to update doors and locks. After a hoax shooting threat at Bend High School in early 2023, the district approved speeding up the installation process.
The district has six Bend Police officers and two Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office deputies that work as school resource officers, each covering roughly six schools each, said officials. The district’s safety department coordinates schedules with law enforcement.
The district has a threat assessment program to assess and manage student threats and concerning behaviors, and uses the Safe Oregon Tip Line to keep track of safety tips from staff, students, families and community members. The tip line is monitored by a number of district officials.
The district uses five safe response protocols that differentiate when a threat has entered the school, is outside of the school, or if the school community needs to be protected from a specific hazard. Caldera High and R.E. Jewell Elementary were went into “secure” mode on Thursday, which is used to secure people inside the building when a threat is outside, while Silver Rail Elementary was in “lockdown” Thursday, which is used to secure people inside the building when a threat has entered.
Schools conduct emergency drills each month. They also conduct two lockdown drills annually, one within the first month of school. Each school also conducts separate drills for different emergencies at least once every year.
The school’s staff and students practiced a lockdown drill two weeks ago, said Cook.
Schools reopening
Silver Rail Elementary will remain closed until further notice. But other Bend-La Pine schools are reopening Wednesday, nearly a week after the shooting. Additional law enforcement will be on school campuses this week, said the district. Private schools that reopened earlier in the week will also have additional law enforcement at the end of the school day on Wednesday, said officials.
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