Rhoam Summer, the 5-year-old who was among four victims fatally shot at an Oregon elementary school, is the youngest person ever killed in a deliberate mass attack at a U.S. school, according to his family’s attorney and experts who track school shootings.
The smaller victim, his two classmates and a teacher, were shot and killed Thursday by a former student in a classroom for children with special needs at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, central Oregon.
This is the 36th shooting in the United States this year on the grounds of a K-12 school, according to CNN’s analysis of several databases, including the Gun Violence Archive.
“Unfortunately, and perhaps insensibly, I am not optimistic about significant change,” Idaho State University assistant professor David Riedman. professor and data scientist who founded the K-12 Shooting Database, spoke about gun violence in American schools.
Rhoam is the youngest victim of 176 planned gun-related attacks on schools since 1966 – in which 762 people were killed or injured, including the four deaths at Silver Rail, according to Riedman’s research. Teacher Megan Lambert was killed along with Rhoam and two others, ages 8 and 11, police said. Reidman’s database includes incidents in which a gun is fired, brandished or a bullet strikes elementary and secondary school property.
School shootings in the United States have declined over the past two years and the same is expected to happen this year, according to Riedman’s research. In 2025, its data showed 235 school shootings, compared to a peak of 352 in 2023.
Mass shootings in elementary schools are rare, experts say.
“It’s rarer than high schools because the kids are younger and most of the school shooters are between 13 and 17 years old. So they’re usually either middle school or high school students, but there are a good number of them in elementary schools as well. About half are in high school, then about a quarter are in elementary and a quarter are in middle school,” Riedman said.
A group of lawyers retained by Rhoam’s parents said in a statement that the boy was the youngest person ever killed in a U.S. school shooting.
“No child should have to experience or worry about violence in their school or their parents fearing for their child’s safety at school,” one of the attorneys, Tim Williams, told CNN on Tuesday.
“You would expect this to happen more in a high school than in an elementary school. It’s just these poor parents who really have no idea to be careful because their child is going into kindergarten. You’re not going to think that your school is going to be destroyed if your child is in kindergarten. I don’t even have words for that,” Williams added.
In a statement, Rhoam’s parents, Kelik and Lillian Summer, recalled his kindness.
“Whenever there were guests in our house, he would bring out cups for everyone to drink or make sure everyone had a snack or make sure everyone had a stuffed animal to cuddle,” the parents said. “He wanted to share everything he had. His heart knew no bounds and it grew with it every day. We were so proud of who he was and who he was becoming.”
His parents asked people to draw in his honor.
“Rhoam was not a child art prodigy, but he had the purest heart and he put love into every scribble, splatter or paint, or broken leaf he tried to shape,” they said.
Last Thursday, a 16-year-old gunman forced his way into the Oregon school by shooting out the windows of an exterior door, police said. He was identified as Griffin J. John II, a former special needs student at the school, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said.
A teacher, who was not injured, threw her cellphone at the shooter, tackled him and tried to retrieve the weapon, the police chief said. Kaylub Giamanco, whose children attend the school, followed the suspect and shot him.
Becky Drury, a 54-year-old inclusion teaching assistant from Bend, and Saylor Graham, 7, were injured in the shooting.
The two deadliest elementary school shootings in the United States involved victims aged six to eleven. In the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, a former student killed six adults and 20 children ages 6 and 7. In 2022, the 19 children killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas were between the ages of 9 and 11.
“With Sandy Hook, it didn’t make a difference, really a big difference,” James Alan Fox, a professor at Northeastern University who along with USA Today and the Associated Press helped create the mass shooting database, said of combating gun violence in schools.
“We had a lot of young kids killed in Uvalde. It didn’t make a difference. The fact that this boy is the youngest, I guess you could say it will have an effect, but really no difference in substance in terms of five versus six, versus seven versus eight. And for the families, that doesn’t matter, obviously.”
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