A series of innocuous choices made by an Oregon father took him to elementary school where he killed a mass shooter in an intervention that his father said would be his last act on earth.
Police recognized quick thinking and decisive action of Bend carpenter Kaylub Giamanco for confronting 16-year-old Griffin J. John II and stopping the teenage shooter’s rampage.
The gunman had already killed a teacher and three young children at Silver Rail Elementary School on October 15 and might have continued his attack if Giamanco, 36, had not happened to be at the crime scene.
In an emotional and poignant interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting published Friday, Giamanco recalled that fateful day.
“I always wanted to change the world, but I felt small. I’m just a carpenter from Bend, Oregon. I wasn’t anyone but my friends and family,” he told OPB. “I feel like if I’m going to have a voice, then I’ll be damned if I don’t use it to change this world, to make it a better place.”
Giamanco’s presence in the nearby Silver Rail neighborhood came after a series of seemingly innocuous decisions the carpenter made that Thursday regarding lunch.
Giamanco prepared a snack for lunch, but changed his mind and instead chose to take her to eat leftover tacos with his wife, he said.
And on the way home, Giamanco had briefly considered going to a masonry shop to buy the bolts he needed, but once again opted to go home for tacos.
Those choices led him to Brentwood Avenue, near his children’s school, shortly before 1 p.m., where he spotted a “man in black” armed with a long gun opening fire on a motorist and a woman mowing the school’s lawn, he recalled.
Giamanco, who kept a .40-caliber handgun in the console of his truck, saw the killer throw his gun over the school fence before scaling it himself.
The father realized what was happening and “that’s when panic took over my brain, and that’s when I opened my center console.”
Giamanco, who has two daughters, ages 5 and 10, who attend Silver Rail, called 911 but couldn’t answer all of the dispatcher’s questions.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go. People are going to die,'” Giamanco said.
As Giamanco approached the school building, he kept a low profile and from his knees he could hear the blood being shed.
“That’s when I started hearing kids pleading for their lives, and then I started hearing gunshots and I started crawling faster and faster and I thought, ‘This is probably the last thing I’ll ever do,'” he said.
Giamanco slipped inside through a bullet-shot window, reached the special education room and put his firearm away in preparation for a deadly confrontation.
He came across the shooter and a teacher fighting over the killer’s gun.
“I knew he didn’t know I was there,” Giamanco said. “And I shot.”
The teacher fled, perhaps thinking Giamanco was a second attacker, he said. But the shooter was still alive and searching for his gun.
“He was reaching for his gun,” Giamanco said. “I looked at him and shot him two more times to make sure he couldn’t move because I was afraid he was going to shoot someone else.”
The police arrived shortly after and Giamanco begged them to let him call his relatives.
“I called my wife to tell her I wasn’t coming home for tacos,” he said.
Then he called his mother.
“She just told me, ‘Okay, baby, calm down. You did the right thing. You’re a hero. You saved lives.’ And I was like, “I didn’t save everyone. I didn’t get them all.’”
Law enforcement officials universally praised Giamanco for his quick action. Hours after the shooting, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said of Giamanco and the teacher who fought with the killer: “I don’t think we can underestimate or underestimate that courage.” »
Giamanco said he has had trouble sleeping since the mass shooting and can’t get the terrible day out of his head.
“I live again, I see faces, I hear voices, I hear screams,” he said.
The carpenter has not yet met the parents of the three children killed. Giamanco said he wanted to tell them he was sorry for not doing more.
“I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” Giamanco said, his voice choked with emotion. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is overwhelming, but there were some I didn’t save.”
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