The Oregon School Shooter Was 16. The Shotgun Was His Mother’s.

BEND, Oregon — The teenager who walked into Silver Rail Elementary School with a shotgun on Thursday has a name now, and so does the central mystery of the case.

He was John J. Griffin II, 16, a former student at the school in this Central Oregon city. And the Maverick 88 12-gauge pump-action shotgun he carried — the weapon registered in his mother’s name — was purchased around his 16th birthday in August, according to three senior law enforcement officials cited by NBC News. The Associated Press confirmed that the gun was bought legally by his mother.

It was Griffin’s mother herself who named him. In a brief, tearful interview on Friday, Shauntai May Nickerson told The Times: “If I could have prevented this, I would have. I’m sorry … I miss him. He was a good boy, he really was.”

The attack, which killed three children and a teacher, lasted only minutes. Police said Griffin first fired on a mechanic’s pickup truck in the school parking lot just before 1 p.m. Thursday — school picture day — then threw the shotgun over the fence, climbed after it, shot through the locked doors, and opened fire inside a special education classroom. Officers arrived at 1:02 p.m., three minutes after the first 911 call. By then, Griffin was already dead — shot by an armed bystander who had followed him inside.

That bystander has now been named too. Kaylub Giamanco, 36, a carpenter and father of two girls at the school, was driving home for his lunch break when he heard gunfire, his brother told NBC News. A concealed-carry permit holder, Giamanco went in after Griffin and killed him before police reached the scene. Governor Tina Kotek praised him for having “heroically intervened to stop further loss of life,” telling him at a news conference: “Your actions carry a heavy emotional burden, and I just want you to know that my thoughts are with you as well.” President Trump called him a “great hero.”

The youngest victim was five years old. In the early hours of Friday, Kelik Summer identified his son Rhoam on Facebook: “Today has been the worst day of my life. My son Rhoam was killed in a school shooting. We are broken and lost, but are surrounded by friends and family who are keeping us safe.” Two more children, ages 8 and 11, and a teacher were also killed. A 7-year-old student and a 54-year-old teacher remain hospitalized in critical condition. It is the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in Oregon’s history, surpassing the 1998 Thurston High School shooting.

Parents are cooperating with investigators, who executed a search warrant on the family home and seized computers and electronics in the hunt for a motive. Griffin’s mother had once told a local TV station, back when her son was ten, that he had special needs — a detail that will now sit at the center of a grieving town’s unanswered questions.

But the question with the widest reach is the gun. In Oregon, no one may sell, deliver, or transfer a firearm to anyone under 18 — yet the law explicitly allows a parent or guardian to hand a rifle or shotgun to their own child. That is how a 16-year-old could be found holding a legally purchased shotgun that was never sold to him. State lawmakers have tried to close the gap: a 2025 bill would have barred under-21s from possessing firearms with narrow exceptions, though the parent-transfer carve-out has survived every such fight so far. (Source: Oregon Legislative Assembly staff measure summary on ORS 166.250 / 166.470 firearm transfer rules.)

Why this matters goes beyond Bend. America is about to argue over this case from both directions at once — one side pointing to the mother and asking how a teenager got unsupervised access to a shotgun, the other pointing to the armed father in the parking lot and saying he is the reason the death toll stopped at four. Oregon, notably, already has among the strictest gun laws in the country; school districts there revoked the concealed-carry exemption for school buildings in 2021. And for readers outside the United States, the timing lands hard: days after a school roof collapse in Peshawar killed 30 children and their teacher, another kind of school tragedy is asking the same question — how do you keep children safe in the one place that is supposed to protect them.

Read our earlier breaking coverage of the attack for the full timeline of Thursday’s shooting.