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Teacher and father stopped gunman
The confrontation
Around 1:00 PM, a man in a red pickup truck spotted the teenager climbing a fence onto school property with a shotgun. The man confronted him, and the gunman shot at the truck several times. The man called 911 while the gunman walked to the building. The doors were locked, but he fired multiple rounds at them and got inside.
A second bystander, a father of two children at the school, had seen the shooting at the truck moments earlier and pulled into the parking lot. He grabbed the gun he legally carried in his car, followed the gunman into the school, and shot and killed him. His mother identified him as Caleb Giammanco, a lifelong Bend resident, and said he asked for privacy.
The classroom
In the classroom, a teacher threw her cellphone at the gunman, tackled him, and fought to take the firearm away. She was not injured, and police said she almost certainly helped prevent more bloodshed.
The weapon and the victims
The gunman was a former student in the school's special education program, and the shooting took place in a special education classroom. He used a Maverick 88, a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun that police say came from his home. Officers found his backpack at the scene with 44 more rounds of ammunition. How he got the gun is still under investigation.
The dead are three children, aged five, eight, and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert. The five-year-old was a boy named Rome Sommer, and the other families asked that their children's names not be released. Lambert was a volleyball coach from Bend, and Silver Rail was her first teaching job and her dream job. Her family said she always fought for the underdog and those with special needs. A seven-year-old child and a 54-year-old teacher are being treated for injuries, and hundreds of residents have gone to a local library to meet with crisis counselors.
Why do locked school doors often fail?
Locked doors slow entry, but the weak point is often the glass. In 2012, the gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut shot out a window beside the locked front entrance to get inside. Afterward, many districts added secure vestibules, where visitors are buzzed into a small room before they can reach the rest of the building. Some also put ballistic-resistant film on glass near entrances.
How does a pump-action shotgun work?
A pump-action shotgun is loaded from a tube beneath the barrel, and the shooter slides the forend back and forward to eject a spent shell and chamber the next. Each shot needs that manual motion, so the rate of fire depends on the person. The gauge number comes from how many lead balls the size of the bore it takes to make a pound, which is why a 12-gauge has a wider bore than a 20-gauge. Maverick Arms, the brand behind the Maverick 88, is a budget line of the manufacturer O.F. Mossberg & Sons.
How do crisis counselors help a town afterward?
Counselors after a mass casualty event often use psychological first aid, an approach developed by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and the National Center for PTSD. It focuses on safety, calm, connection to family and community, and practical information rather than asking people to retell what happened. The method was published as a field operations guide in 2006 and is used by Red Cross and public health teams in many countries.
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