Kaylub Giamanco woke up and got his kids ready for school that Thursday like it was any other day. The family made breakfast and packed lunches. He and his wife spent a little extra time dressing up their two girls because Oct. 15 was picture day at Silver Rail Elementary.
Giamanco dropped the girls off as usual, then the 36-year-old carpenter headed to a job site northeast of Bend. He had brought a packed lunch in his truck, but when afternoon came around, he decided to go home instead to eat leftover tacos with his wife. He thought about running some errands on the way, but decided against it. He was four blocks from their house when he turned on Brentwood Avenue, the road running along the south side of Silver Rail.
In an exclusive interview with OPB, Giamanco described the series of seemingly insignificant decisions that brought him to that intersection at 12:58 p.m. that day — the same time a 16-year-old carrying a shotgun approached his children’s school. It was the packed lunch he didn’t eat, the masonry shop where he didn’t stop, the bolts he needed but didn’t buy, and the gun he says had just been “collecting dust” in his truck console.
Passing by the school that day, Giamanco spotted someone carrying a gun, followed him into the school, and then shot and killed the teen who fired shotgun rounds into a special education classroom. The shooter killed three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a 25-year-old teacher. Two other people were seriously injured. Police credit Giamanco with saving many lives at the school of more than 400 children.
But before all that, there were years helping a single mother as the oldest of seven children, there was the motorbike accident when he saved his brother’s life with a makeshift tourniquet, and the informal military training he’d gotten from Iraq War veterans. A lifetime that shaped Giamanco, he believes, and prepared him for what he would do next.
“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 said. “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.”
“I’m sorry. I have to go in. People are going to die.”
Right after he turned on Brentwood Avenue Oct. 15, Giamanco noticed a “man in black” holding a long gun. This must be a prank, or a BB gun, he remembered thinking. Then he saw the shooter fire twice at a red pickup truck and turn toward the school grounds to fire once more at a woman mowing the school’s lawn.
When he saw the shooter throw the gun over the school fence before climbing it, “that’s when panic fled into my brain, and that’s when I opened my center console.”
His “heart dropped” for a second, he said, as he wondered if the .40 caliber handgun he rarely used would be there. It was. He got the magazine from a separate compartment and drove into the school parking lot while watching the shooter walk across the school grounds.
“I just was in full panic, like, ‘No, there’s children, there’s babies in there.’ I told my Siri to call 911,” he said. The dispatcher had questions for him, but he didn’t stay on the call to answer them.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die.’”
He hopped over the fence as the shooter was passing along on the opposite side of a wallball court, he said. Giamanco pursued while staying out of sight, shuffling along the court as the shooter reached the glass double doors to the school’s side entrance.
“I heard him fire two shots into the doors,” he said.
Giamanco ran from the wallball court to the building and got prone, moving on hands and knees along the windows.
“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 crawled faster and faster, he said, until he reached a bottom window that had been shot out and crawled through it too. He stayed on hands and knees until he reached the special education classroom on his left. He re-racked his weapon to make sure a live round came out, “so that I knew that I was ready to go.”
When he peeked through the window of the classroom, he saw a teacher struggling with the shooter, both in profile to him.
“I knew that he did not know that I was there,” Giamanco said.
He swung the door open and stepped in.
“And I fired.”
The teacher and the shooter dropped to the floor. Then the teacher rose and sprinted from the classroom in fear, Giamanco assumed, thinking that he was a second attacker. He looked down at the shooter.
“He was scrambling for his weapon,” he 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.”
By then, Giamanco could hear sirens. He went out of the classroom to look for the teacher who’d fled, then laid his gun on the ground and held up his hands as the first officer on the scene appeared, geared in body armor and wielding a rifle. Minutes had passed since he called 911 outside the school.
As police and first responders descended, Giamanco made his way back to his truck. He unloaded his gun, laid it on the floorboard and pulled out his phone.
“I called my wife to tell her that I’m not coming home for tacos,” he said. He told her to get to the school right away because he had just fatally shot someone who was killing children and teachers.
He called his mom next.
“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.’”
“I want to apologize for not saving their babies”
Word of Giamanco’s actions first circulated over the emergency dispatch: “shooter has been neutralized, possibly shot by a father at the school.”
Giamanco’s name was circulating publicly less than a day later.
In the hours after the shooting, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz spoke at a press conference about his actions, and those of the teacher who grappled with the shooter. “I don’t think we can underestimate or underappreciate that courage,” Krantz said.
In the week that followed, Giamanco and his family have been inundated by reporters calling and knocking on their door, and by political advocacy groups hoping he will tell his story on their behalf.
Armed civilians stopping mass shooters is exceptionally rare. In 600 cases in the U.S. since 2000, it’s happened only a few dozen times. Experts who study mass shootings told OPB they were unaware if any of those had involved schools.
President Donald Trump called Giamanco “a great hero that went in and did the business.”
Giamanco has been thrust into the limelight, into politics and gun control debates. Deschutes County reported this week that applications for concealed handgun licenses are on the rise since the incident.
Giamanco, who told OPB he’s an independent, says he’s not interested in anyone’s finger pointing.
“I teach my children that we love, we accept everybody,” he said. “I don’t want to make this a political situation.”
In the shooting’s aftermath, he’s just trying to sleep at night. After his family goes to bed, he lies awake.
“I relive, I see faces, I hear voices, I hear screams.”
He thinks about the teenager he shot.
“Sometimes there’s a child out there that didn’t have the love that they deserved,” Giamanco said. “But I do want to believe that if he had more love in his life and better parenting, that this could have been prevented.”
He also replays the day in his head and wonders if he could have stopped him sooner and saved more lives.
“It was split second decisions while gunfire was going off, while children were losing their lives,” he said.
He thinks about his gratitude for the teacher who wrestled with the shooter, who he says gave him the chance to make his shot without losing his own life. He still doesn’t know her name.
“I would love to give her a hug because that’s a real true hero,” he said.
He thinks about the families of the people who were killed. He said he hasn’t spoken to any of them yet.
“I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” he said, voice breaking with emotion. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome, but there were ones that I didn’t save.”
“Meant to be here”
Giamanco knows he’s being called a hero. He said it’s getting easier each day to think of himself that way.
“I want to be a hero in this world,” he said. “It feels like I was meant to be here and do this.”
He grew up in Bend, a self-described sci-fi nerd who loves riding four-wheelers and motocross bikes with his siblings. His grandfather bought him his first gun when he was 7, a shotgun they took bird hunting in the Ochoco Mountains. He said he and his grandfather led classes to teach kids how to safely handle guns, use a bow and arrow, and survive if you’re trapped in the woods.
He plans to teach his daughters to use guns.
“It’s more dangerous to be afraid of a gun than it is to just be comfortable with one and know that they’re there to either provide you food or to provide you protection,” he said.
When Giamanco was 15, his father left his family.
“It was chaotic,” he said. “We did not grow up wealthy, but my mother did everything she could to raise seven children, mostly on her own.”
As the oldest of the seven, Giamanco realized they were all looking to him.
“I was young at the time. I wasn’t a father,” he said, but others kept telling him: “These kids are looking up to you. You lead by example. They watch everything you do.”
Giamanco stopped hunting for a long time, starting when he was around 18. He studied geography at Central Oregon Community College before landing a carpentry apprenticeship through a family friend.
It was only years later, while building a restaurant in Redmond, that the client reintroduced him to guns, he said.
“He was highly decorated. He’s had multiple tours in Iraq and he is an amazing gentleman,” Giamanco said. “His platoon would come out to Bend and I built targets and walls for them.”
The veterans offered to train him on using military drill and weapons, and the experience inspired him to own guns again.
“I felt like if I didn’t have that training, I probably wouldn’t be alive today,” he told OPB.
“I can see it in her eyes”
Until his interview with OPB, Giamanco had not yet told his family the details of what happened at Silver Rail, he said. He decided to share his story, he said, because he feels a need to embrace the public eye. He doesn’t know whether he’ll return to carpentry.
“I feel like I was put on this earth to do something more than just fix houses,” he said.
An idea has taken hold in the days since the Silver Rail shooting: a motocross race that donates all proceeds to schools for improving their safety. That could mean funding bulletproof glass on the doors, better locks, and better research to make these kids feel safe at school. He also wants school resource officers at every school.
“We have AI. We are in a world of technology right now. We have smart homes. We have smart cars. Why can’t we have smart schools?”
His own kids won’t be going back to school for quite some time, he said.
Since the shooting, the family has stayed at a hotel, then a vacation rental, he said, because they can see the school from their house. They’ve been trying to take their minds off the tragedy with homemade chowder and board games.
“My 5-year-old probably a hundred times a day comes up to me and just hugs me and says, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ And I hug her, I pick her up, and squeeze her as hard as I can. I say, ‘I love you too. You’re my world.’”
His 10-year-old daughter is more reserved. She knows what’s going on, he said.
“She has just the biggest heart in the world and I can tell, I can see it in her eyes.”
He keeps reminding her of his love, he said, and that he will always be there to protect her, no matter what.
“That’s our job as parents to be here for children, to spend time with them, to show them our love and compassion,” he said, “So that they know that they have people in this world standing behind them.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
