Oregon School Shooting, Russia's View On US-Ukraine Split, DOJ Sues California

Three children and a teacher were killed at an elementary school in Oregon. Police say a teenager shot through locked doors before a bystander followed him inside and killed him. What are investigators learning? I'm Steve Inskeep with A. Martinez and this is our first from NPR News. Ukraine struck another Russian oil refinery in response to attacks on its energy sites. President Trump says Ukraine's president doesn't want to end the war. How does Moscow see the growing split between Washington and Kiev? And the Justice Department mailed Los Angeles County a thumb drive naming voters they believe are non-citizens and gave them 48 hours to investigate. Californians refused now that the OJ is suing and the administration stopped those ballots so close to election day. Stay with us, we've got the news you need to start your day. A teenager shot open the locked doors of an elementary school in Bend, Oregon on Thursday where he killed at least three children and a teacher. Local officials say the 16-year-old suspect was killed by a bystander who followed him into silver rail elementary. Steve Koch is super-intended of the Bend the Pine School District. We are heartbroken, we are horrified, this is the kind of thing you hear about in other places and pray that it never happens here and it has happened here. Classes and after school activities are canceled today across that district. MPR's Arzura Svani has been following developments on this, Arzura so have authorities released any more details about the victims or even the suspected government? Well the children who were killed were 5, 8 and 11 years old, according to officials. A teacher was also killed. Their names have not yet been released. Another child, a 7-year-old and another teacher were also critically injured. As for the suspected shooter, the only details officials have shared is that he was 16-years-old in a resident of Bend. It's unclear if he attended that school earlier in his life or if he knew anyone there at the time of the attack and his motivations are still under investigation. How did he get into the school? It looks like he managed to enter by firing at locked doors. That's according to the Bend Police Department Chief Mike Kranz. I was looking at the website of the Bend Lapine schools last night and something that stood out to me was how the district touts its security protocols. All schools in the district are said to have secure vestibules for sign-in. Visitors must present an ID and electronic systems buzz people onto school grounds. But all of this clearly was not enough to keep the gunmen from blowing right through. How fast did officers get there? It appears they responded within minutes at 12.59 someone called 911 to report their vehicle was being shot at two minutes later after the shooter entered the building. The school went into lockdown according to police chief Kranz and he said officers appeared on the scene a minute later. It was soon after that that the suspect was shot by someone at the scene who followed him into the school at a press conference last night Oregon Governor Tina Koteck commended that bystander. Enter the community member who heroically intervened to stop further loss of life. Your actions carry a heavy emotional burden and I just want you to know that my thoughts are with you as well. It's not clear who the community member was whether he was a parent or some armed passer by who's bringing to action is not yet confirmed. So shooting like this is going to raise questions around gun laws. So what are war against laws like? So in recent years voters in Oregon and the state have approved or enacted everything from a ban on high capacity magazines to tougher background checks and permitting procedures to a prohibition on ghost guns or 3D printed guns. But some of these have yet to be implemented because they're being challenged in court by gun rights groups. All right, that's MPR's Arzu Razvani, thank you very much. President Trump's latest attempt to rein in the war between Russia and Ukraine appears over before it ever began. Ukraine struck back at Russian oil refineries on Thursday responding to Russia's attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Both seem to have disregarded an energy ceasefire that Trump alone appears to have declared. Joining us with a view from Moscow is MPR's Charles Baines. So Charles, tell us about these new Ukrainian attacks. What do they hit? Yeah, sure. These Russian authorities say Ukraine struck a major oil refinery in Rizan, that's to the southeast of Moscow. We don't know the extent of the damage, but more important here is the message it sent. This attack occurred after Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky said he was "done" trying to abide by Trump's energy ceasefire, given that Russia had never ceased its attacks on Ukrainian electrical and heating infrastructure. And the Kremlin, what's the Kremlin saying? Well, we heard from President Vladimir Putin yesterday, who played down the seriousness of this strike on the oil facility, but said it was part of a pattern of surprise Ukrainian attacks on energy, on commercial warehouses, and elsewhere that Russia would have managed twice over. Here's Putin. So here Putin says Ukraine is constantly taking some measures, in other words, hitting targets, that Russia, frankly, hadn't thought of. And when we respond, Ukraine's western backers lean on Russia to stop, even though Ukraine struck these targets first without thinking of the consequences. So, you know, A, in a way, it's a backhanded compliment to Ukraine's tactical ingenuity, which incidentally seems to have found a new favorite target, Russian data centers. In recent days, Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck Russia's premier tech companies, kind of think of the equivalent of Google in order to disrupt services and bring the war home to Russians in a new way. But Putin is blaming Ukraine for punching back. I mean, it sounds very much in line with what we've been hearing from President Trump, too. Yeah, that's true. And President Trump has made clear he wants to bring an end to this war, and he now clearly blames Ukraine and specifically President Vladimir Zelensky for preventing him from accomplishing that. And Trump discusses Zelensky yesterday in an interview with Rob Finnerty on Newsmax. They're going to end up with a settlement of some kind, they're not going to do it with him. He doesn't want to settle. He says he wants to settle, but he isn't. No, I'm not a big fan of Zelensky. They've destroyed that country. Now, Trump went on to say that dealing with Putin was a lot easier than dealing with Zelensky, which many new krain will see as more proof that Trump's vision for a peace deal is one that inherently favors Russia. And so how does President Trump's apparent animosity to Zelensky look for a Moscow? Well, I think it's fair to say the Kremlin is sitting back and enjoying the show. Let's not forget this was all set off by this agreement that Trump struck with Putin to buy Russian diesel fuel in defiance of sanctions as Trump tries to tamp down gas prices before the U.S. midterm elections. Zelensky's openly criticized that deal for providing Russia with additional billions for its war chest, which it would. It also puts Trump's ceasefire proposal in a different light. Trump is essentially pressuring Ukraine not to strike the U.S.'s investments in Russian diesel at a moment when Russia is ramping up its attacks on Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine's Air Force confirmed NPR that they're now out of the U.S. made patriot missiles. That our key is only means of stopping Russian ballistic missiles from continuing to pound Ukraine. One more thing that oil has Russia released the oil. Yeah. Now, the Kremlin yesterday confirmed it had started releasing the fuel to global markets. You may hear more about that from Putin when he takes the stage at an energy conference here in Moscow later today. Right. That's NPR's Charles Mainz in Moscow. Thank you very much. Thank you. The Trump administration is escalating its search for non-citizen voters. Yeah. On Tuesday, three weeks before election day, the Justice Department delivered a flash drive to the top voting official in Los Angeles County. That official was told he had 48 hours to investigate names listed on that drive or he would be sued. Yesterday, the DOJ followed through and filed suites against LA County and the state of California. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks joins us now to discuss this. Miles, since the DOJ sued, I'm guessing Los Angeles did not respond well to that demand. Right. So this thumb drive included the names of 20,000 people that the federal government believes are likely non-citizens and on the voter rolls in California. But LA County did not consider this drive to be a secure medium for this sort of information. I mean, the password for the drive was literally included on a posted note with the delivery of it. And the clerk there, Dean Logan noted that. Also, he told the DOJ he felt the process that they were asking for would actually break numerous other laws that govern how elections run, including restrictions on voter purges this close to election day. And more broadly, California, as well as many election experts, have just expressed a lot of skepticism of the administration's non-citizen voting claims, not only because of President Trump's history of lying in this realm, but also the data analysis that seems to have been used to come up with this list, matching incomplete voter data with imperfect immigration data. It's been shown to generate a lot of false positives. Seems you said seems as the federal government actually explained where these numbers come from. And surely Weber, who's the Democratic Secretary of State of California, noted that in her response to the DOJ saying that she was not going to disenfranchise thousands of people in her state based solely on, quote, unsupported and likely inaccurate accusations. Miles, how far back does this effort from the administration go? I mean, in some ways it goes back a decade to President Trump. Trump claiming in 2016 that California's voter rules were full of non-citizens. But this specific saga started this summer. You might remember, President Trump made this big primetime speech in July on election integrity, and as part of that, his administration claimed that it had found hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls of just four states. Now those numbers have already been proven to be vastly overstated, and there's never been evidence to support this idea that non-citizens vote in anything but tiny numbers in American elections. But California was one of the states that the administration called out, and this list seems to have been generated from that same effort. All right, so California didn't go along with the DOJ's request, which is where this lawsuit comes in. What is the DOJ asking a federal judge to do now? So vote-by-mail ballots have already gone out in California for this year's general election. So the DOJ wants to make sure those ballots that are associated with this list of people are segregated for investigation that they don't get counted. In the lawsuit, the DOJ says it seeks this relief to prevent unlawful dilution of American citizens' votes and to protect the integrity of our elections. So what are the chances of the DOJ will be successful with this? It would be surprising. The Constitution very clearly says states run elections, and this DOJ has lost a historic number of cases the last two years trying to encroach on that. For instance, they've tried to force states to hand over non-public versions of their voter rolls and lost 26 out of 26 cases where there's been a decision on that issue. Rick Hassan, a law professor who runs UCLA's Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote online yesterday that he expects this California lawsuit to quote "go nowhere" and that it was more likely a political strategy to cast out on the midterm results. That's MPR's Miles Parks, Miles Thanks. Thank you. We want to invite you to watch a new special report from Michelle Martin. It's called "Going There, a Matter of Life and Death." Michelle sat down with clinicians, lawmakers, even a couple of athletes who offered their personal perspectives about the rising suicide rate among black Americans. And they also dug into the misconceptions that can get in the way of people getting the help they need. You can watch the full conversation on MPR's YouTube page. And that's a first for Friday, October 16th at the Martinez. Ben I'm Steve Innscape. These up first was edited by Miguel Maseas, Tina Criah, Ben Swayze, Mohamed El-Bardisi, and Alice Wolfley. It was produced by Ziad Butch and Ben Abrams. Our director is Christopher Thomas and we get engineering support from Stacey Abbott and Robert Rodriguez. Our technical director is Carly Strange, and our executive producer is Jay Schadler. Join us tomorrow. [Music]