Kaylub Giamanco said he still thinks about the children he could not save after he chased the gunman into Silver Rail Elementary in Bend and shot him dead. In an interview published Friday, he said he wanted to apologize for not saving the children killed in the Oct. 15 attack and said he feels he failed the families of those who died.
The interview is landing now because it adds a first-person account to a shooting that killed three children ages 5, 8 and 11, along with a teacher, and left another student critically injured and a teacher hospitalized. Police said Giamanco and an unarmed teacher helped save lives inside the school, making his account one of the most direct descriptions yet of how the violence stopped.
Giamanco said he had dropped off his two daughters at the school that morning and gone on to work. A few hours later, he was passing the school when he saw a person wearing black and carrying a long gun fire shots into a pickup truck and at someone mowing the school’s lawn. He said the gunman climbed a fence and headed toward the building, and that he grabbed a.40-caliber handgun from his truck’s center console and followed while dialing 911.
He told the dispatcher to send help before hanging up and said, “I’m sorry I have to go in. People are going to die.” Giamanco said he crawled toward the building on his stomach, using his elbows, and heard children pleading for their lives before he heard gunfire. He entered through a window that had been shot out and saw a teacher grappling with the shooter in a nearby classroom.
What happened next is the part he has kept returning to. Giamanco said he fired after stepping into the room, and both the gunman and the teacher dropped to the floor. He said the teacher then bolted as the shooter reached for his shotgun, and he shot the gunman two more times to make sure he could not move. Police said the teacher had thrown her phone at the attacker and wrestled with him before Giamanco killed him.
That account leaves him in an uneasy place: he says he was the last line of defense, but he also says he was not close enough to stop all of the killing. Police credited Giamanco and the unarmed teacher with saving lives, and a day after the shootings President Donald Trump called him a “great hero” who “took care of business.” For Giamanco, though, the most lasting fact is simpler and harder to escape — he got there in time to end the attack, but not in time to save everyone.
