Giamanco said he took the handgun from his truck before entering school

Police said Kaylub Giamanco was carrying his gun legally in his truck before he took it from the vehicle and used it in the Oct. 15 intervention at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, where he fatally shot 16-year-old former student Griffin J. John II. Police credited Giamanco and the unarmed teacher who confronted John II with saving lives. A day after the shootings, President Donald Trump called Giamanco a “great hero” who “took care of business.”

John II, a 16-year-old former student at Silver Rail, had blasted through locked doors with a shotgun and attacked a special needs classroom. Three children — ages 5, 8 and 11 — and a teacher were killed. Another student was critically injured, and a teacher was injured and hospitalized.

Giamanco, a 36-year-old Oregon carpenter whose two daughters attend Silver Rail, said he dropped his daughters off at the school that morning before driving to work. A few hours later, he was passing the school again as he was heading home for lunch. He said he saw someone dressed in black and carrying a long gun fire shots into a pickup truck and at a person mowing the school’s lawn before the person climbed a fence and headed toward the school building.

Giamanco said, “panic fled into my brain.” He grabbed a .40-caliber handgun from his truck’s center console and went after John II as he dialed 911. He asked the dispatcher to send help before hanging up his phone. In the interview, he said: “I’m sorry I have to go in. People are going to die.”

As he got closer to the building, Giamanco said, he lay on his stomach and used his elbows to crawl across the ground. He described hearing children pleading for their lives and then hearing gunfire, which made him crawl faster. He said he told himself: “This is probably the last thing that I’m ever going to do.”

Police said another teacher threw her phone at John II and wrestled with him before Giamanco followed the gunman into the building and shot and killed him. The teacher who struggled with John II has not been publicly identified. Giamanco told Oregon Public Broadcasting that she was “a real true hero” whose actions gave him an opening to kill the attacker.

According to Giamanco, he entered the school through a window that had been shot out. Looking into a nearby classroom, he saw a teacher grappling with John II. He said he faced them both in profile, giving him an open shot. He also said: “I felt like I was the last line of defense between him and the rest of the children.” Giamanco said he swung the door open, stepped into the room and fired his gun.

He said both John II and the teacher dropped to the floor. The teacher bolted from the room as John II reached for his shotgun. “He was scrambling for his weapon,” Giamanco said. “I looked at him and I shot him two more times to make sure that he couldn’t move, because I was afraid of him shooting anybody else.”

A second teacher in the classroom, Becky Drury, said in a statement Wednesday that she lay on the floor, helplessly playing dead, after being struck at close range by a shotgun blast that nearly severed her left hand.

Giamanco said he regretted not arriving soon enough to save all the children and felt like he had failed the families of those who died. In the Oregon Public Broadcasting interview published Friday, he said: “I want to apologize for not saving their babies, that’s probably the biggest thing for me right now.” He added: “The gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome. But there were ones that I didn’t save.”

He also said: “I can’t tell you what it feels like to take a life … but I can tell you that I genuinely feel like I was supposed to be there.” Giamanco added: “If I wasn’t there, I just don’t know what would have happened.”

Russ Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.