The Oregon father who stopped a school shooting in Bend spoke for the first time this week, telling Oregon Public Broadcasting that he rushed into Silver Rail Elementary School after dialing 911 and warning the dispatcher: "I have to go in. People are going to die."
The man who ran toward the gunfire
Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter and father of two daughters who attend the school, said he had dropped his girls off that morning and was driving home for lunch on October 15 when he saw a 16-year-old boy firing a shotgun — first at a red pickup truck, then at a woman mowing the school lawn — before the teen climbed a fence and headed for the building.
"That's when panic fled into my brain, and that's when I opened my center console," Giamanco said in the interview published October 23. He grabbed a .40-caliber handgun he kept in his truck, told Apple's Siri to call 911, and then hung up on the dispatcher to go after the shooter himself.
What happened inside the school
The gunman, identified by police as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, blasted his way through locked doors with a shotgun and attacked a special needs classroom. Three children — ages 5, 8 and 11 — and a 25-year-old teacher, Megan Lambert, were killed. Educational assistant Becky Drury and a seven-year-old student were wounded.
Giamanco crawled through a shot-out window toward the sounds of the attack. "That's when I started hearing children pleading for their lives and then I started hearing gunfire, and I just started army crawling faster and faster," he said. Inside the classroom he saw a teacher wrestling with the attacker — police say the teacher had thrown her cellphone at the gunman and fought for his weapon — before Giamanco fired, killing the teen.
A hero haunted by who he couldn't save
Despite national praise — Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said he "heroically intervened to stop further loss of life" — Giamanco said he feels he failed the families of those who died. "I want to apologize for not saving their babies, that's probably the biggest thing for me right now," he said. "The gratitude for saving people's children is awesome. But there were ones that I didn't save."
Police Chief Mike Krantz also credited the teacher who tackled the shooter, saying her struggle "almost certainly helped prevent more bloodshed." The investigation remains ongoing.
The Bend shooting, which killed three children and their teacher, is one of the deadliest school attacks in Oregon's history — and Giamanco's interview offers the clearest account yet of the civilian who ended it.
Music in this post's reel: Kevin MacLeod - Volatile Reaction (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0