Giamanco grabbed .40 caliber handgun from center console, then hopped a fence

Kaylub Giamanco, the 36-year-old carpenter whose children attend Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, spoke publicly for the first time after the 15 October shooting. The Guardian reported that Giamanco had received national attention. In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Giamanco recounted the attack and his pursuit of the shooter.

Giamanco fatally shot Griffin J John II, a 16-year-old former student at Silver Rail who broke into the school and shot six people. Megan Lambert, a 25-year-old teacher, and three children, including five-year-old Rhoam Summer, died in the shooting.

Giamanco said he was in the area only because he had decided to return home and eat lunch with his wife rather than the meal he brought to work that day. He lives near the school. For a moment, he said, he thought it was a prank when he saw a man in black armed with a gun headed toward Silver Rail. Then he saw the man fire the gun and climb over a school fence.

Giamanco pulled a .40 caliber handgun from his center console and headed into the school parking lot, calling 911, before hopping over a fence to pursue the shooter. He told a 911 operator, “I have to go in. People are going to die.”

He quietly followed Griffin without the teenager seeing him, at one point crawling on his hands and knees when he heard “children pleading for their lives.”

Giamanco told OPB: “I just started army crawling faster and faster and I told myself this is probably the last thing that I’m ever going to do.”

Giamanco crawled through a broken window and toward the special education class Griffin had entered, where a teacher was fighting with the shooter. He came into the classroom and fired his gun. Griffin fell and was reaching for his weapon. Giamanco, who said he “was afraid of him shooting anybody else,” shot him two more times.

Giamanco told OPB that he lies awake at night thinking of what he saw that day and the teenage perpetrator, and wonders whether he could have done more. “I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” he told the outlet. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome, but there were ones that I didn’t save.”

Giamanco said he wants safer schools with school resource officers at every site and would like to raise funding to support school safety efforts.