A string of innocuous choices made one day by an Oregon father brought him to the elementary school where he brought down a mass shooter, an intervention the dad believed would be his last act on earth.
Police have credited the quick thinking of Bend carpenter Kaylub Giamanco for confronting 16-year-old Griffin J. John II and stopping the teen shooter’s carnage.
The gunman had already killed a teacher and three young children at Silver Rail Elementary School on Oct. 15 and could have continued his attack had Giamanco, 36, not randomly ended up at the crime scene.
In an emotional and harrowing interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting published on Friday, Giamanco recalled that terrible day.
“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.”
Giamanco’s presence in the neighborhood near Silver Rail came after a series of seemingly benign decisions the carpenter made that Thursday about lunch.
Giamanco packed a mid-day snack but changed his mind about eating it, instead opting to drive him to have leftover tacos with his wife, he said.
And on his way home, Giamanco had briefly considered going to a masonry shop to buy some bolts he needed, but again opted to go home for the tacos.
Those choices led him to Brentwood Avenue near his children’s school, where he spotted a “man in black” with a long gun opening fire on a motorist and a woman mowing the school lawn, he recalled.
Giamanco called 911 but couldn’t answer all the dispatcher’s questions.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die,’” said Giamanco who kept a .40 caliber handgun in his truck console.
As Giamanco got closer to the school building, he kept a low profile and from his knees could hear the bloodshed.
“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.
Giamanco crawled in through a shot out window, reached the special education classroom and re-racked his firearm in preparation for a deadly confrontation.
He came upon the gunman and a teacher fighting for the killer’s gun.
“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. But the shooter was still alive and reaching for his gun.
“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.”
Police arrived shortly after and Giamanco pleaded with them to let him call his loved ones.
“I called my wife to tell her that I’m not coming home for tacos,” he said.
Then he called his mother.
“She was just like, ‘Okay, baby, calm down. You did the right thing. You’re a hero. You saved lives.’ And I was just like, “I didn’t save everybody. I didn’t get them all.’”