Father Who Stopped Oregon School Gunman Describes the Weight of Survival
A father who killed the gunman at his daughters’ school is now speaking with the rawness of someone caught between gratitude and grief. Kaylub Giamanco says he heard children pleading for their lives before he entered the classroom at Silver Rail Elementary School in Oregon, where three boys and a teacher were killed earlier this month.
He describes himself as a rescuer who arrived too late for some children and just in time for others. The emotional conflict in his account is stark: relief that more students survived sits beside a brutal awareness of who did not.
“I want to apologise for not saving their babies,” he said of the dead children’s parents in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting. The sentence lands like a clinical description of acute moral injury — the kind of psychic rupture that can follow a violent event when a bystander is forced into an impossible choice.
A Split-Second Decision at the School Doors
Giamanco, 36, said the day began like an ordinary family morning. Breakfast, packed lunches, and school picture day filled the early hours before he went to work as a carpenter. He had originally taken lunch with him, then decided to go home to eat with his wife instead. That change in routine brought him past the school just as the attack began.
At first, he thought a person carrying a long gun might be joking. Then the man fired at a pickup truck and moved toward the school.
The sequence matters because it shows how rapidly an everyday environment can become a mass-casualty scene. He retrieved a handgun from his vehicle, called emergency services, and went after the attacker. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die,’” he recalled.
He followed the gunman as shots were fired through the school’s locked glass doors. Children were crying out from inside. Hearing that scene from only a few feet away appears to have fixed the experience in his memory with unusual force. He said he crawled toward the building and told himself it might be the last thing he ever did.
A Classroom Fight and a Narrower Margin of Death
Inside the classroom, the teacher was already fighting the attacker. Police said she threw her phone at him, tackled him, and tried to take his shotgun. Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said she “almost certainly helped prevent more bloodshed.” Giamanco has credited her with giving him the opening he needed to intervene without losing his own life.
He crawled through a shattered window, reached the classroom, and opened fire. He said he fired again when the attacker reached for his weapon, then set his own gun on the ground and raised his hands when an officer appeared.
In practical terms, the encounter lasted only moments. Biologically and psychologically, those moments will last much longer. High-adrenaline threat exposure can etch sensory fragments into memory with unusual intensity, and his account reflects that kind of imprinting: faces, voices, screams, and an immediate sense of responsibility for lives that remained under fire.
Giamanco described himself as the “last line of defence” between the children and the gunman. He added that he “was supposed to be there” that day. That sentence carries the weight of survivor’s guilt, the kind that often follows violent episodes in which an intervening civilian lives while others die despite every effort.
The Children, the Teacher, and the Families Left Behind
Police said six people were shot in the classroom. Three boys, aged five, eight, and 11, were killed, along with teacher Megan Lambert, 25. Another child and another teacher were wounded. The youngest child, Rhoam Summer, was five. His father said the family was “broken and lost.”
Lambert had been working in what her family called her “dream job.” They said she fought for “the underdog and those with special needs.” The teacher who survived, Becky Drury, 54, said in a statement shared with US media that the gunman shot her as she tried to shut her classroom door.
The gunman was identified as Griffin J John II, a former pupil who had attended special education classes at the school. Police said his motive remains under investigation. The attack has already exposed the familiar and devastating pattern of school violence: a fast-moving assault, a desperate attempt to barricade, improvised resistance by a teacher, and then a bystander forced into armed action in a setting built for children, not combat.
What the Body Remembers After the Shooting Ends
Giamanco’s description of life after the attack reads like acute trauma in motion. He said he now lies awake after his family goes to bed and replays the scene in his mind. “I relive, I see faces, I hear voices, I hear screams.” Those are not abstract memories. They are sensory intrusions, the kind that can accompany severe psychological stress after exposure to death, threat, and helplessness.
He called his wife after the shooting to say he would not be home for lunch and that she needed to get to the school immediately. Then he phoned his mother. “Mum, I just had to take the life of what I think is might be a child because he ran into my daughter’s school with a gun,” he said.
The sentence reveals the kind of emotional conflict that can follow a defensive killing, especially when the attacker is a juvenile. Relief, horror, and doubt coexist in the same breath. He has been praised as a hero, but his own words point to a more difficult reality: praise does not erase the sound of children calling for help, and it does not resolve the knowledge that he could not save everyone.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek publicly acknowledged both sides of that burden, praising his intervention while saying her thoughts were with him as well. His mother, Kenda Freeman, later said in a family statement that he was not seeking recognition and wanted privacy.
His account leaves one central fact untouched by ceremony or gratitude. Even when an armed civilian stops a school attack, the damage is already done — and the psychological cost continues long after the final shot.