Shooter in fatal Bend, Oregon, school shooting was former student there
I keep coming back to the fence. The detail that he climbed over it, rather than walking through the front door, suggests a deliberate choice to enter a space he no longer belonged to, even though he once did. Former student, current killer. That reversal is what makes this so hard to process.
I think about what we don't know yet, which is almost everything. The motive, the weapons, the warning signs. We'll get some answers in the coming weeks, but the core question of how a 16-year-old reaches this point won't have a neat answer. These stories keep repeating, and each time we're left with the same hollow arithmetic of lives counted at a press conference.
I don't have a clever takeaway. I just want the families to have their grief respected, and I want the rest of us to stop treating this as inevitable. That's the honest place I land.