‘All of us were screaming’: 4th grade student recounts Oregon school shooting

When fourth-grade student Kalani Journeigh heard what she described as a boom noise while in school on Thursday (October 15), she did not think much of it until Silver Rail Elementary’s Vice Principal started running down a hallway and screaming. 

Journeigh said she and some students were then made to hide in an unfamiliar room for about 30 minutes while they heard gunshots. 

A 16-year-old boy shot and killed a teacher and three children in the school in Bend, Oregon, on Thursday. The shooter was stopped by another teacher who tackled him and an armed father fatally shot him, officials said on Friday (October 16). 

When asked what was going through her head during the incident, Journeigh, 9, said: “Kind of like that we might die.”

“My heart was beating really fast,” the student said. “But after the couple of gunshots that we heard, it just stopped and we never heard it again.”

Officials identified the shooter as Griffin J. John II, a 16-year-old former special-needs student at the school who was armed with a shotgun. He fired about 15 rounds in the classroom and had another 44 rounds on him, police said.

Police were trying to determine what motivated the shooter and how he obtained a Maverick 88 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said.

Bend is a city of about 100,000 people some 175 miles (280 km) southeast of Portland, and much of the community is traumatized.

A friend of Journeigh’s was going to get therapy, the nine-year-old told Reuters, “because that was really traumatizing to her”.

When asked if she felt it was traumatizing for her as well, Journeigh replied, “Yes.”

US school shootings have become more frequent in recent years. Since the start of this year, 118 people have been wounded or killed in 149 incidents involving a gun fired or brandished in a school, or gunshots striking school property, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a non-profit online tracker.

A separate online database, the Gun Violence Archive, has recorded 371 mass shootings since January 2026, defining mass shootings as four or more people being struck by gunfire, not including the shooter. Three of those, including the Bend incident, occurred in public schools, the archive said.