The family at the end of the list

One · What happened

A classroom at Silver Rail

A driver outside Silver Rail Elementary School called 911 a minute before one o’clock on 15 October. He had stopped to confront a young man walking toward the school with a shotgun, according to the timeline Bend police released. The young man fired at the pickup at least three times. Police Chief Mike Krantz said the gunman had thrown the shotgun over the school fence and climbed after it. He shot out the glass of a set of double doors to get inside, then walked into the classroom on the left. Superintendent Steven Cook said it was a special education classroom with students of different ages. The first officers arrived about two minutes after the call.

Krantz told reporters that three children were dead, the youngest five and the oldest eleven, along with a twenty-five-year-old teacher. Every victim was shot in that one room, he said. A seven-year-old girl was in serious but stable condition at Oregon Health and Science University Hospital in Portland. A fifty-four-year-old school employee was also badly hurt, with wounds that were not life-threatening. Cook said the gunman had been a special needs student at the school, and police have not announced a motive.

In the room, a teacher threw her cellphone at the gunman and then tackled him to take the shotgun away, Krantz said. He credited her with helping to prevent more bloodshed. A thirty-six-year-old carpenter with two daughters at the school then went in with a pistol he kept legally in his truck. He shot the gunman several times, Krantz said, and the gunman died. The carpenter’s family told CBS News that he is not seeking recognition and wants to thank everyone who helped.

“This is going to be a long investigation,” Krantz said, and officers will stay at the school for several days. Law enforcement officials told CBS News that the gunman’s mother had bought the shotgun. Two officials told NBC News that she has been cooperating with the inquiry into how a sixteen-year-old came to have the weapon. Investigators are reading his phone and his online history.

Two · What it is doing

A place to stand in the story

CNN’s headline on 16 October hailed the father and the teacher for preventing further tragedy. His family told CBS News that he wants no recognition. A reader on either side of the old argument over guns has a reading of the two weapons ready, the pistol for one position and the shotgun for the opposite one. His reading was fixed before he opened the story. The country will keep having that argument in its legislatures and at its kitchen tables. A reader answers for what the story did to him in the first minute.

The police chief’s praise for the teacher who tackled the gunman sends a reader into arithmetic on himself. A reader who decides he would have charged in behind the carpenter feels a flush of certainty that nothing in his life has tested. Another, sure he would have frozen, carries a shame with nobody to confess it to. Both are looking at themselves. The twenty-five-year-old teacher who died in the room was at her dream job, her family told NBC News.

Krantz said investigators were still looking for a motive. The reporting does not link the superintendent’s remark about the gunman’s schooling to what he did. A reader without a motive reaches for the nearest verdict. To one the mother who bought the shotgun is guilty of it. To another the boy was a monster, or the casualty of some system, according to the argument he walked in with. Nobody in the reporting disputes that a sixteen-year-old walked into a classroom and killed three children and a teacher, and that is an evil thing to have done.

Gratitude that the shooting stopped is right and costs the reader nothing. A gladness at the death of a sixteen-year-old can pass for that gratitude if the reader never looks closely at it. Only the reader can tell which one he is feeling. The gunman was also somebody’s son, and reports name his mother as the person who bought the shotgun. No one outside that household knows how it is spending the weekend.

Three · Where the ground is

The king in the room over the gate

Absalom, King David’s son, raised an army against his father. David had told his commanders to deal gently with the young man, and Joab killed him in the forest anyway (2 Samuel 18:5, 14). A runner brought the news to David at the city gate. The king “went up to the chamber over the gate and wept,” and as he went he cried, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!” (2 Samuel 18:33).

The soldiers who won the battle heard the king was grieving for his son and crept back into the city like men ashamed after running from a fight (2 Samuel 19:2–3). Joab went into the king’s house and told David that he had shamed the men who saved his life. His complaint was that “you love those who hate you and hate those who love you” (2 Samuel 19:5–6). David got up and sat in the gate. The chapter keeps the weeping and the rebuke side by side.

The first sorrow belongs to the families of the three children and the teacher, and to the seven-year-old girl in a hospital bed in Portland. Nobody who reads the story is excused from giving it to them in full. The gunman’s family is now known to the country as the household of the person who did it. David stood in that position himself when he wept in his chamber for a son who had died in a war against his own father’s army.

The men who ran

On the night he was betrayed Jesus told his disciples, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The same night in the garden of Gethsemane soldiers came for him, and the men who had just heard that sentence “all left him and fled” (Mark 14:50). Peter, who had sworn he would die with him, said before dawn that he did not know the man. Jesus went on from that garden to the cross with every one of them gone.

The question of what a reader would have done in that classroom has no answer a man can trust. The ones who loved Jesus most ran that night. He laid down his life for them on a cross the next afternoon. Whatever a reader has decided about the gunman’s mother, his own standing with God comes from what Christ did for sinners. Peter wrote to scattered Christians that “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

Where the parents were sent

Bend police sent families to a church about ten minutes after the first alert, the Bend Source reported. OPB reported that hundreds of parents and neighbors gathered there. Local clergy planned a vigil at Drake Park for that night, OPB reported, and NBC News said it was held by candlelight. Paul told the Corinthians about a hard stretch in Macedonia and wrote that “God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus” (2 Corinthians 7:6).

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Nobody in Bend needs advice from a stranger this weekend. Five jobs are open to a reader a long way off, each with an address near his own door.

1. 01

   Thank a special education teacher in writing.

   Write one card to the teachers and aides in a special education room near you, saying what you know about the work, and leave it at the school’s front office. Jesus said, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Matthew 18:5). The adults in a room like the one at Silver Rail spend the year with the children who need the most help.

2. 02

   Call the parent whose child did the harm.

   Think of a family you know with a child in jail, in court or in a program for something that child did. This week, ask when a visit would suit. Hebrews 13:3 says, “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them.” Sit and listen, and keep the visit short.

3. 03

   Ask your teenager one question about a friend.

   Sit down with your teenager and ask what the teenager would do on seeing a classmate post a threat or a picture with a gun. Tell the teenager to come to you at once, or to call 911 if it cannot wait. Mary and Joseph found the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46). Ask once, then listen for a full minute.

4. 04

   Ask whether your church has a room for waiting parents.

   Find out whether your own congregation has a room and a phone tree ready for an afternoon when parents need somewhere to wait. Give your name for the job of sitting with them. Paul told Titus that believers should “help cases of urgent need” (Titus 3:14).

5. 05

   Name the girl in the hospital before God each morning.

   Name the seven-year-old girl recovering in Portland and the family of the twenty-five-year-old teacher in prayer. Add the household of the gunman, whose names the reports leave out. Psalm 56:8 says to God, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” Christians wait for Christ to come back, and Isaiah 25:8 says of that day, “He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces.”