On Thursday afternoon, a 16-year-old former student named Griffin J. John II forced his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, shooting through the locked glass panels of the front doors. He found a special needs classroom. He shot and killed a teacher and three children, the youngest of whom was five years old. Before he could continue, a teacher tackled him. A father of two Silver Rail students, Kaylub Giamanco, 36, saw the gunman enter the school during his lunch break, followed him inside, and shot the gunman dead with a legally carried concealed firearm. When police arrived, five people were dead including the shooter. A seven-year-old student and a 54-year-old educational assistant were taken to a Bend hospital with serious injuries. (NBC News tracked the shooting and its aftermath through Friday, including the identities of the suspect and surviving victims.)
The suspect had previously attended Silver Rail. His mother had purchased the pump-action shotgun he used. Bend Police said Friday that the teacher who tackled him and the father who shot him almost certainly prevented additional deaths. The teacher’s name hasn’t been released. One of the families spoke publicly: five-year-old Rhoam Summer’s parents identified their daughter to local reporters. She hadn’t finished kindergarten.
In May 1998, a 15-year-old student opened fire in the Thurston High School cafeteria in Springfield, Oregon, killing two people and wounding 25. That attack came eleven months before Columbine. In the 28 years since, the category of event has become something the country has learned to process without resolving. Oregon passed a permit-to-purchase firearms law in 2022 that has been blocked by courts and has never taken effect. The gunman at Silver Rail used a shotgun his mother had bought while the law sat in litigation. These are the facts as they exist today.
On Friday, President Trump waived the Russia-related sanctions and tariffs in the Graham Act before they could take effect. The law was named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was among its principal authors, and Trump signed it last month. It would have imposed tariffs of up to 100 percent within 30 days on goods from countries that purchase Russian oil or gas. The White House executive order said the waiver served the national interest. It didn’t explain how. Bloomberg reported that a central factor was the administration’s concern that the penalties would raise diesel prices ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. (Bloomberg reported Saturday on the waiver’s connection to domestic fuel costs.)
The law had passed with support from at least 85 of the 100 senators. Russia’s investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev praised the waiver, calling it “an important and truly historic moment.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “an abject and predictable failure in leadership.” The criticism came from both parties. In August 2017, Trump signed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which had cleared the Senate 98-2. He called it “seriously flawed” at the signing. That law included constraints on his authority to ease the sanctions. The pattern of Congress passing Russia sanctions legislation with overwhelming bipartisan margins and the executive finding ways to limit what those laws actually do has now run through two administrations and a decade.
This is day 232 of the war with Iran. On Saturday morning, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said a supertanker carrying approximately two million barrels of crude oil caught fire in the southern Strait of Hormuz after hitting naval mines. The United States Navy said it has established effective operational control of the strait and that commercial vessels continue to transit. A maritime monitor in London counted 10 attacks in the Hormuz in the last week alone, and at least one vessel sank. Transits through the strait, which on a normal day carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, remain approximately 70 percent below pre-conflict levels. Oil is trading at $110 a barrel, the first time it’s held that level since May. (Al Jazeera’s live blog for October 17 tracked the supertanker fire and the competing US and Iranian claims.)
The war began February 28 with coordinated US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities. There have been at least four ceasefire attempts since April, none of which held beyond a few weeks. The midterm elections are 17 days from today. Oil also held above $110 for a sustained stretch in the spring of 2012, during an earlier round of sanctions pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. That episode was resolved through years of multilateral diplomacy and produced the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That agreement no longer exists. This conflict is different in kind from what produced it.
Katie Zacharia is no longer the White House press secretary. She was named to the position on October 9, gave her first briefing on Tuesday October 13, and was out by Friday, October 16. A senior administration official described the departure as a transition to a new role, which hasn’t been announced. Fox News reported that Trump suggested Zacharia reconsider the role after the briefing drew criticism. NBC News reported that her exit was tied in part to the disclosure that she had represented herself publicly as a lawyer, but hadn’t passed the bar examination. (NBC News reported Friday on her departure and the timeline of her tenure.)
She served five days. The post has turned over twice in the past two months; Karoline Leavitt departed at the end of August. A key communications role is vacant 17 days before a midterm election in which control of both the House and the Senate is being contested. No successor has been named.
Amber Guyger was released from the Christina Melton Crain Unit in Gatesville, Texas, on Friday after serving seven years of a ten-year sentence. She had been convicted in 2019 of the murder of Botham Jean, a 26-year-old accountant she shot inside his Dallas apartment. Guyger, an off-duty Dallas police officer at the time, had come home to the wrong floor of her building and shot Jean after entering his unit, believing he was an intruder in her own apartment. The jury found her guilty of murder. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles approved her release on October 1, over the objections of Jean’s family. Her first parole application had been rejected in 2024. (NewsOne reported on her parole and the family’s response.)
Jean’s family opposed the parole. Civil rights attorneys who represented the family called the decision a reopening of a wound. Jean was 26 years old. He was from St. Lucia. He had been in Dallas for two years, working as an accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He was sitting on his couch eating ice cream when Guyger entered his apartment and fired.
Pope Leo XIV, who is 71 years old and the first American to hold the office, is recovering from surgery to remove the lower lobe of his right lung after a diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma. Vatican doctors reported this week that recovery is proceeding as planned. Post-operative tests are normal. His lung function has returned to expected levels. He has resumed working from his hospital room at Gemelli in Rome, meeting with his chief of staff, Archbishop Paolo Rudelli. He has been walking, eating normally, and doing respiratory physiotherapy. He was expected to remain at Gemelli for several more days while waiting for the pathology report, which will determine what further treatment, if any, is required. (Al Jazeera reported Wednesday on the Vatican’s update on his condition.)
He’s 71 and recovering from cancer surgery that lasted 90 minutes and produced no complications. He slept. He ate. He went back to work. The pathology results aren’t in yet. Whatever comes next will depend on what they show. For right now, there’s this: a man with a serious diagnosis who, when given the option to rest, picked up the phone.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
