A father steps into the attack
Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter from Bend, Oregon, has described in detail how he confronted the gunman who attacked Silver Rail Elementary School. According to NBC News, which summarized an interview Oregon Public Broadcasting published Friday, police have credited his quick thinking with stopping the violence.
The attacker, identified as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, had already killed a teacher and three young children on Oct. 15. NBC News reported that he could have kept attacking had Giamanco not ended up at the scene by chance.
The ordinary choices that led him there
Giamanco told OPB that his presence near the school followed a string of small decisions about lunch that Thursday. He had packed a mid-day snack but decided not to eat it, and drove to have leftover tacos with his wife instead. On the way home, he briefly thought about stopping at a masonry shop for some bolts he needed, but chose to go straight home.
Those choices put him on Brentwood Avenue, near his children's school. There, he said, he saw a “man in black” with a long gun firing at a motorist and at a woman mowing the school lawn.
Inside the school
Giamanco called 911 but could not answer all of the dispatcher's questions. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die,’” he told OPB. He kept a .40 caliber handgun in his truck's console.
As he approached the building, he stayed low and could hear the violence from his knees. “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 and I told myself, ‘This is probably the last thing that I’m ever going to do,’” he said.
He crawled in through a shot-out window and reached the special education classroom, where he re-racked his firearm in preparation for a deadly confrontation. Inside, he found the gunman and a teacher struggling over the shooter's gun.
The confrontation and its aftermath
“I knew that he did not know that I was there,” Giamanco said. “And I fired.” The teacher fled, possibly believing Giamanco was a second attacker, he said. The shooter was still alive and reaching for his weapon. “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.”
When police arrived shortly afterward, Giamanco asked them to let him call his loved ones. He phoned his wife. “I called my wife to tell her that I’m not coming home for tacos,” he said. She told him he had done the right thing and had saved lives. He answered that he had not saved everyone.
Giamanco also said he hopes to use the attention to do good. “I’ve always wanted to change the world, but I’ve felt small. I’m just a carpenter from Bend, Oregon. I was a nobody other than to 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’m not going to use it to change this world, to make it a better place.”
