In September 2020, a local TV crew filmed a skinny 10-year-old named Griffin John II in an Oregon special education classroom as it reopened after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown. A reporter asked his mother how she felt about sending him back.
Shauntai Nickerson, KTVZ reported, said Griffin had struggled learning from home, so going back to the classroom would be a welcome change for him.
"I think it will be great for Griffin because, you know, I'm not certified in teaching a special needs student," Nickerson said as Griffin stood beside a white dry-erase board, looking at an equation. "And so, I think it'll be great for my son to get back in there and get the help that he needs with the skilled teachers that he needs to get it from."
Six years
later, Griffin walked to his old school, Silver Rail Elementary, used a pump-action shotgun to blast through a locked side-door entrance and turned left into the first classroom he came to. In the space of three minutes, he killed three young students and a teacher before a father of Silver Rail students followed him inside and fatally shot him.
Griffin, 16, attacked a special needs classroom on Oct. 15, though not one he had attended, according to Scott Maben, a spokesman for the Bend-La Pine Schools.
Two weeks later, police and school officials have said little publicly about what might have spurred the rampage.
Nickerson didn't respond to requests for comment.
But another parent shared her memories of Silver Rail. In an Oct. 27 interview with USA TODAY, Mary Casanave Sheridan described a special needs classroom at Silver Rail bustling with children ages 5 to 11 with all manner of issues, ranging from emotional trauma to autism.
The program her child and Griffin attended was designed for students experiencing intensive behavioral and social skill challenges. Teachers pushed parents to participate in school activities as much as possible – from in-school events to parties and field trips − to help their children better integrate into the broader school system and community, Sheridan said.
Griffin's motive remains part of the focus of the criminal investigation.
"Everyone wants to know why, including us," Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said at an Oct. 16 news conference.
"We may never get that full answer," Krantz added, "but we want it."
In the years leading up to the shooting, Griffin was in and out of school, enrollment records provided by Bend-La Pine Schools show.
He attended kindergarten at Elk Meadow Elementary in Bend, then first and second grades at Silver Rail from 2016 to 2018, where he started special education classes but missed about a month of school. He completed fifth grade at Silver Rail in 2021, then moved to Pilot Butte Middle School, where he missed more than two months of school in seventh grade.
He returned for eighth grade, then attended Bend Tech Academy starting in 2024. He left that school, too, unenrolling in May 2025. He returned to Bend Tech in fall 2025, but left in November and did not return to finish his 10th grade year, Maben said. The district has not released records about his education after November 2025.
At the Oct. 16 news conference, Krantz said Griffin was "not currently enrolled in Bend-La Pine Schools" at the time of the shooting.
His father, Griffin J. John, 47, has lived on the streets and in campsites around Astoria for more than a decade, has had numerous run-ins with the law and survived at least two drug overdoses, The Oregonian reported. He told police there he had not seen his son in about a year, the newspaper reported.
“I’m going through a lot right now,” he told The Oregonian this month at his campsite in a wooded area about two miles outside downtown Astoria.
Nickerson, according to media reports, serves as a health aide at a nursing home and worked at Olive Garden. She did not respond to questions about other media reports saying she bought the 12-gauge Mossberg Maverick 88 shotgun around the time of Griffin’s 16th birthday in August.
Mass shooters 'develop a grievance' and act on it
Mass shooters, especially young ones, "are looking for control, and they're going to go someplace that is familiar to them," said Katherine Schweit, the former FBI special agent who ran the bureau's active-shooter program after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 and co-authored the bureau's foundational study of 160 such attacks.
But familiarity is only part of the equation, said Schweit, whose forthcoming book, "Smart Parents, Safe Schools," analyzes 25 years of U.S. school shootings. When an attacker like Griffin has such intimate knowledge of a place, she said, investigators look for something deeper and more personal.
"Shooters develop a grievance, and whether it's real or perceived, they find a way to act out on that grievance," Schweit said, "and that's exactly what we saw here."
Virtually all mass shootings at schools are similar in that they are premeditated events, she said: "A shooter makes a decision to do this and then plans and prepares. Every shooting is the same in that way, but the motivation and what their grievance might be is individual to that person."
Years in a special education program leave a robust paper trail, including Griffin's individualized education program, that investigators are now assembling, Schweit said: "This guy was on the radar of mental health professionals, educators and potentially even law enforcement."
The harder question, she said, is what happened to Griffin after he left the hands-on school program.
In the FBI's original study, she said, was a Portland-area shooter who “had been watched all the way through school, and years and years later, he shot up a place.”
The officers who had tracked him, Schweit said, “had a kid on the radar for a long time, and then the kid graduated. They thought, 'Okay, everything's good.' Everything fell apart."
That’s often what happens when kids fall off the radar, Schweit said, though she cautioned that it is too early to know whether that describes Griffin.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oregon sifts through teen's school history for clues into shooting
