Approximately 600 people congregated at Caldera High School on Saturday, Sept. 24 to celebrate the life of Megan Lambert, 25, a Silver Rail Elementary School teacher who was shot and killed along with three students on Thursday, Oct. 15 at Silver Rail.
The Caldera auditorium was packed Saturday afternoon with attendees, including people from R.A.D. Camps, a Bend organization that offers outdoor adventures and nature-based preschool. Lambert, a 2023 graduate of Boise State University, was a R.A.D. counselor for two years. Other attendees included friends and former teachers from Mountain View High School, from which Lambert graduated in 2019; friends from her book club that met regularly at Dudley’s Bookshop and Cafe; and her cohort from when she worked as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Barcelona, Spain.
Andy Young, a science teacher at Mountain View High School from which Lambert graduated and then worked as a substitute teacher, spoke at the memorial service, from which KTVZ shared video to media outlets. Young said he talked with Lambert’s colleagues and former teachers “to find themes, commonalities, shared memories, shared feelings, shared thoughts about Megan. What I found, not surprisingly, is what I experienced with her.
“She was, simply put, a spark of joy. She was boisterous, gregarious, kind, a good soul. She was a leader and people were drawn to her. Megan had a warm and loving smile, and as Mr. Vallerga put it, that effing laugh,” Young said, to laughter from the assembled crowd. “She had a hearty laugh that could fill a room with joy and happiness. The other thing about Megan is she just has this presence, and she had the tat on her arm that gave her some street cred, too. She could command a room of high schoolers very well with compassion and love and patience, and she was really funny, too.”
“She was really stoked to have her first full-time teaching job at the school where she’d subbed for a significant amount of time and where she knew a lot of the students by name,” Young added, referring to her position at Silver Rail. “I was told during her new teacher orientation that she stuck out, that she was the most enthusiastic and exciting to get going. Nothing surprised me about that because she was a spark of joy.”
Chance Caruso, owner of R.A.D. Camps, called Lambert “a cornerstone of our program” and said he’d spent a lot of time remembering Lambert since he learned of her death and has been “Thinking about all of the positives that we had with her, thinking about all of the instances where she made me smile, she made our entire team smile. She probably made every person in the entire community here smile a lot.”
In her short life, Lambert obviously touched many, including people from the Source, where she interned in 2017, and players and coaches at Central Oregon Volleyball Club, for which she coached. During her first year working for COVC, she forfeited her pay to help volleyball players who couldn’t otherwise afford to participate. The club announced its established a scholarship fund in Lambert’s honor, and Oregon Community Foundation has established the Megan Lambert Memorial Fund.
A “Walk for Megan: A Community Walk of Remembrance” is set for Sunday at 12:30pm starting at Dudley’s Books in the Old Mill District. There’ll be carnations, Lambert’s favorite flower, distributed to participants, who’ll walk along the Deschutes River in remembrance of those whose died at Silver Rail, including Rhoam Summers, 5, and two other 8-year-old and 11-year-old students.
Kaylub Giamanco, 36, who has two children that attend Silver Rail and lives nearby, was passing the school on his lunch break Oct. 15 when he saw Griffin J. John II, 16, approaching Silver Rail with a shotgun after having shot twice at a pickup truck. John shot his way into the school’s special-education classroom, wounding teacher Becky Drury, 54, and Saylor Graham, 7, a wheelchair-bound student, and killing Lambert, Summers and the two other students. Giamanco pursued John into the school, and then shot and killed him. Giamanco and his family attended Lambert’s memorial service on Saturday.
Lambert’s memorial service included strict media protocols to maintain privacy for Lambert’s friends and family, who requested that KTVZ-TV be designated as the pool camera for video distribution, while Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Jason Carr was the official photographer. DCSO requested that media refrain from approaching attendees before or after Lambert’s service.
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