Oregon Dad Who Killed a School Shooter Says a Teacher's Tackle Gave Him His Shot

Kaylub Giamanco was four blocks from home, heading back for leftover tacos with his wife, when he turned onto the road beside his daughters' elementary school and saw a gunman. Eight days later, the Bend, Oregon, carpenter who ended the Silver Rail Elementary shooting has told his story for the first time, in an exclusive interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting.

He credits an unarmed teacher with giving him the opening he needed, and he says the sound of children pleading for their lives still keeps him awake.

What happened on Oct. 15

It was picture day at Silver Rail. Just before 1 p.m., Giamanco, 36, watched a "man in black" fire twice at a red pickup and once more toward a woman mowing the school lawn. He then saw the gunman throw his shotgun over the school fence and climb after it (OPB).

Giamanco opened his truck's center console, where his .40-caliber handgun had been "collecting dust." He had Siri call 911 but didn't stay on the line. "I said, 'I'm sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die,'" he told OPB.

He hopped the fence and trailed the gunman out of sight. He heard two shots blast through the school's locked glass doors, then crawled along the windows on his hands and knees. "That's when I started hearing children pleading for their lives and then I started hearing gunfire," he said. "I told myself this is probably the last thing that I'm ever going to do."

He crawled through a shot-out window panel and reached the special education classroom. Through its window, he saw a teacher wrestling with the shooter.

He swung the door open and stepped in. "And I fired," he said. When the gunman scrambled for his weapon, "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 the first officer arrived, Giamanco set his gun on the ground and raised his hands (OPB; The Oregonian).

The teacher who made the shot possible

Police have said the teacher threw her phone at the 16-year-old gunman, then tackled him and fought with him (AP). Giamanco said that struggle is the reason he is alive.

"She gave me the opportunity to make my shot without losing my life," he said. "Without her, and that little spur-of-the-moment delay, I very much feel like I would have been facing the shooter head-on and we could have both died, or I could have died, and I felt like I was the last line of defense" (The Oregonian).

She ran from the room after he fired, probably thinking he was a second attacker, and he still doesn't know her name. "I would love to give her a hug because that's a real true hero," he said.

The cost

The gunman killed three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert. A 7-year-old student and a 54-year-old teaching assistant were badly wounded. Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said the shooter fired 15 rounds with a pump-action shotgun his mother had bought (Newsweek; OPB). Police credit Giamanco with saving many lives at a school of more than 400 children.

Giamanco carries what he couldn't stop. "I relive, I see faces, I hear voices, I hear screams," he said. He has not yet spoken with the victims' families. "I want to apologize for not saving their babies," he told OPB, his voice breaking. "The gratitude for saving people's children is awesome, but there were ones that I didn't save."

A good guy with a gun, and the training behind it

Giamanco grew up in Bend as the oldest of seven, raised mostly by a single mother. His grandfather bought him his first gun, a shotgun for bird hunting, when he was 7. Years later, a client who had served multiple tours in Iraq and his platoon trained him in military drills. "I felt like if I didn't have that training, I probably wouldn't be alive today," he said. He plans to teach his daughters to shoot: "It's more dangerous to be afraid of a gun than it is to just be comfortable with one" (OPB).

President Trump called him "a great hero that went in and did the business," adding, "thank goodness for a man that had a gun and knew how to use it" (KPTV/Gray News). The NRA said he showed "what happens when good men have the means and ability to act swiftly" (Newsweek).

Armed civilians stopping mass shooters is rare: it has happened only a few dozen times in about 600 U.S. cases since 2000, and experts OPB consulted knew of none at a school. Deschutes County reports that concealed handgun license applications have risen since the shooting (OPB).

Giamanco, who calls himself an independent, says he doesn't want the moment turned into a political fight. "I teach my children that we love, we accept everybody," he said. His ask is practical: a school resource officer at every school, plus a motocross race he hopes will raise money for bulletproof glass and better locks.

"I'm just a carpenter from Bend, Oregon," he said. On Oct. 15, that was enough.