It was California's forgotten mass shooting. But for victims, the 'hell' never ends
RANCHO TEHAMA RESERVE, Calif. — Gage Elliott became an orphan on Nov. 14, 2017. He was 7 years old.
That morning, his father and paternal grandmother, who were raising him together in a modest house at the end of a gravel road, were gunned down during a mass shooting across this remote north-central California community. Over two days, according to the FBI, five people were slain and 14 others were wounded, including five children at Rancho Tehama Elementary School, before the gunman, 44-year-old Kevin Janson Neal, took his own life.
Danny Elliott and Diana Steele were killed five years after Gage's mother died in an accident, said Sissy Feitelberg, Gage's maternal grandmother. They were the second and third people shot to death by Neal, who lived in a light-blue mobile home barely 100 yards from their property.
Gage never spent another night in that house on Bobcat Lane where he once played in the yard with his father. He never went back to Rancho Tehama Elementary School after that day, when he and approximately 100 other students were locked down after staffers heard gunfire nearby and quickly hustled them in from recess.
He never returned to the classroom where the gunman unsuccessfully tried to open the door, which had been locked just seconds earlier. He never saw the school's new windows, which replaced the ones shattered by Neal's bullets, or the repairs to the bullet holes in
