Father recounts killing Bend school gunman

The father who has been credited with helping to stop a gunman at an elementary school in Bend, Ore., last week described in his first public interview how he pursued the assailant and fatally shot him.

The dad, Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter from Bend, said in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting published Friday that the day of the attack, Oct. 15, started like any other. Giamanco, who did not respond to messages from The New York Times on Friday, said he woke up, helped his two daughters get ready for picture day, dropped them off at Silver Rail Elementary School then drove to a jobsite.

Giamanco had packed lunch that day but had to run into town to buy supplies for the job he was working on, so he called his wife and said he would come home for lunch instead. He asked her to reheat some leftover tacos.

Those choices led him to a fateful moment. As he drove onto Brentwood Avenue, which runs right by Silver Rail, Giamanco said, he saw a figure in black with a long gun fire twice at a red pickup truck and once into a field. Then he saw the gunman throw his weapon over a fence by the school.

“And that’s when panic flooded into my brain,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. Giamanco opened the center console of his truck, “and just said ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ and I grabbed my gun, and I put the magazine in it, and I racked the action.”

Giamanco, who the police said had a .40-caliber handgun legally stashed in his truck, drove into the school parking lot. He watched as the gunman, armed with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, walked along the school’s exterior.

“I was just in full panic, like, ‘No, there’s children, there’s babies in there,’” he said. “I told my Siri to call 911,” he said, and apologized to the dispatcher as she continued to ask him questions.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die,’” Giamanco told Oregon Public Broadcasting. Giamanco hopped over a fence and crept behind the attacker around a wall-ball court. He heard the assailant fire into the side doors of the school as he blasted his way inside.

“And 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. “And I told myself, ‘This is probably the last thing that I’m ever going to do.’”

Giamanco crawled into the school through a window that had been shot out and peered into a special education classroom, where he saw the attacker — later identified as Griffin J. John II, 16, a former special education student at Silver Rail — wrestling with a teacher.

John had already killed three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a 25-year-old teacher, Megan Lambert, in the classroom, police said. He had also wounded a 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher. But another teacher — the one Giamanco saw — had thrown her cellphone at John and had started wrestling with him in what the police called a heroic confrontation that prevented more bloodshed.

Giamanco, who grew up hunting birds with his grandfather, prepared his gun.

“At that point, I swung the door out and open, and I stepped in, and I fired,” he said. The teacher and the gunman dropped to the floor, he said. The teacher then ran out of the room, fearing Giamanco was another attacker, he said.

Giamanco said he saw John scrambling for his shotgun and shot him two more times, killing him. A heavily armed police officer arrived moments later.

Giamanco said he put his gun on the floor, put his hands up and told the officer, “‘We need your help over here right now — please, please, please.’”

Then Giamanco went back to his truck, unloaded his gun and picked up his phone.

“I call my wife to tell her that I’m not coming home for tacos,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. He said he also told her: “I just had to shoot and kill somebody, and that I had to watch him take the lives of children and teachers.”

Police have not identified a motive for the attack. They have said the gunman had 44 rounds of ammunition when he was killed. In the days since the rampage, Giamanco said he had been reflecting on the shooting with a heavy mix of emotions.

He said he wanted to meet the families of the victims and “just cry with them and hold them.”

“I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” Giamanco said, adding that the “gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome. But there’s ones that I didn’t save, and that’s probably the hardest thing for me right now.”

Giamanco told Oregon Public Broadcasting: “I want to be a hero in this world. It feels like I was meant to be here and do this.” He added: “I’ve always wanted to change the world, but I’ve felt small. You know, I’m just a carpenter from Bend, Oregon.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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