Oregon father who killed school shooter says he regrets he didn’t save children

The Oregon man who shot and killed an armed teenager to end a deadly rampage at an elementary school last week said he was the children’s “last line of defense” and regrets not arriving soon enough to save them all.

Kaylub Giamanco, whose two daughters attend Silver Rail Elementary School where the Oct. 15 attack took place, said he feels he has failed the families of those who died.

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“I want to apologize for not saving their babies, that’s probably the most important thing to me right now,” Giamanco told Oregon Public Broadcasting in an interview published Friday. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is overwhelming. But there were some I didn’t save.”

Three children – ages 5, 8 and 11 – and a teacher were killed last week at a school in Bend, Oregon, when a former student there, Griffin J. John II, 16, burst through locked doors with a shotgun and attacked a special education classroom. Another student was seriously injured and a teacher was injured and hospitalized.

Police said another teacher threw her phone at the attacker and fought with him before Giamanco shot and killed him after following the shooter into the building.

Giamanco said he dropped his daughters off at school that morning before heading to work. A few hours later, the 36-year-old carpenter passed the school again on his way home for lunch.

He said he spotted someone dressed in black and carrying a long gun, shooting at a pickup truck and a person mowing the school lawn before the shooter climbed a fence and headed toward the school building.

Giamanco said “panic fled through my brain.” He grabbed a .40-caliber handgun from the center console of his truck and chased the shooter as he dialed 911. He asked the dispatcher to send help before hanging up his phone.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry I have to go in. People are going to die,'” Giamanco said in the interview.

“It’s probably the last thing I’ll do.”

As he got closer to the building, Giamanco said, he lay down on his stomach and used his elbows to crawl on the ground.

“That’s when I started hearing kids pleading for their lives,” he said. “And then I started hearing gunshots and I started crawling faster and faster. And I was like, ‘This is probably the last thing I’ll ever do.'”

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Giamanco said he entered the school through a window that had been destroyed. Peeking into a nearby classroom, he saw a teacher grappling with the shooter. He said he faced them both in profile, giving her an open shot.

“I felt like I was the last line of defense between him and the rest of the kids,” Giamanco said.

He opened the door, entered the room and fired his gun.

Both the shooter and the teacher fell to the ground. The professor fled the room as the shooter reached for his shotgun.

“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.”

“I was supposed to be there”

Police said Giamanco carried his gun legally in his truck and credited him and the unarmed teacher who confronted the shooter with saving lives. A day after the shooting, President Donald Trump said Giamanco was a “great hero” who “took care of business.”

A second teacher in the class, Becky Drury, said in a statement Wednesday that she was lying helplessly on the floor playing dead after being hit at point-blank range by a shotgun blast that nearly severed her left hand.

The teacher who fought the shooter has not been publicly identified. Giamanco told the public broadcaster that she was “a true hero” whose actions gave her an opportunity to kill the attacker.

“I can’t tell you what it feels like to take a life…but I can tell you it really feels like I was meant to be here,” Giamanco said. “If I hadn’t been there, I just don’t know what would have happened.”

Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.