Family of 5-year-old killed in school shooting asks the world to draw for him

Rhoam Summer, the 5-year-old who was among the four victims fatally shot at an Oregon elementary school, is the youngest person ever killed in a deliberate mass attack at a US school, according to his family's attorney and experts who track school shootings.

The littlest victim, his two classmates and a teacher were gunned down by a former student Thursday in a classroom dedicated to children with special needs at Silver Rail Elementary School in the central Oregon city of Bend.


It was 36th shooting in the United States this year on K-12 school grounds, according to analysis of multiple databases, including the Gun Violence Archive.

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 Sadly, and maybe callously, I'm not optimistic there are going to be any meaningful changes,  David Riedman, an Idaho State University assistant professor and data scientist who founded the K-12 Shooting Database, said of gun violence in US schools.

Rhoam is the youngest victim in 176 planned, gun-related attacks at schools since 1966 - in which 762 people were killed or wounded, including the four deaths at Silver Rail, according to Riedman's research. Teacher Megan Lambert was killed along with Rhoam and two others, aged 8 and 11, police said. Reidman's database includes incidents in which in a gun is fired, brandished or in which a bullet strikes K-12 school property.

School shootings in the U.S. have declined for the past two years and the same is expected this year, according to Riedman's research. In 2025, his data showed 235 school shootings compared to a peak of 352 in 2023.

Mass shootings at elementary schools are rare, experts say.

 It's rarer than high schools because the children are younger, and most school shooters are between 13 and 17. So they're usually either middle school or high school students, but there are a fair number at elementary schools, too. It's about half are at high schools, and then about a qu
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