TROUTDALE, Ore. — They stopped in fire lanes, on medians, in spaces so tight one man wedged his sedan between two cars and climbed out of his sun roof. They double-, triple- or quadruple-parked, spilling into driveways and crosswalks, disregarding every traffic law.

The loved ones of the children at Reynolds High School in the Portland, Oregon, suburb of Troutdale knew that a student was shot to death during the second-to-last day of school. And they knew the shooter was dead.

They also knew that the 3,000 children who survived would be waiting for them at a grocery store parking lot a mile away.

Details spilled out in fits and starts on Tuesday. The shooting started in a gym detached from the main school building. A 14-year-old boy named Emilio Hoffman was fatally shot in the boys’ locker room. Physical education teacher Todd Rispler also was in the gym and was grazed by a bullet.

But he escaped serious injury and managed to alert school officials of the shooter.

“This is a lockdown,” the school announced over the speaker system, according to junior Andrea Chanocua. “This is not a drill.”

Locked in a classroom, sophomore Dominic Senarsky, 16, said he followed the police response by listening to scanner traffic with a phone app.

“I was scared, because we were listening directly to it, so we knew everything that was going on,” he said.