Newly released 911 audio from the Deschutes 911 Service District captures the moment a Bend, Oregon father told a dispatcher he was armed and prepared to confront a gunman attacking Silver Rail Elementary School, where his two daughters were students.
“Oh my god. Hello 911. Someone’s at the school. My daughter’s school with a gun,” Kaylub Giamanco, 36, told the dispatcher in the Oct. 15 call. Moments later he said, “I have a gun, and I will shoot them right now.”
The dispatcher pressed him to hold back. “OK, tell me exactly what happened. Don’t do anything. Let me get an officer there, OK?” she said. “OK, I understand. Stay on the line with me.”
As the call went on, Giamanco relayed the attacker’s location inside the building and warned that people were being shot. “They’re on the south side, entering the building, right now,” he said. “Sir, I need you to tell me what’s going on. We have help en route,” the dispatcher responded.
Giamanco, a carpenter, later told Oregon Public Broadcasting he did not expect to survive entering the school. “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 entered with a .40-caliber pistol he kept legally in his vehicle. Inside, he found a teacher struggling with the 16-year-old attacker, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said at an Oct. 16 news conference. The teacher had thrown her cellphone at the gunman and tackled him before Giamanco shot the attacker multiple times, according to Krantz.
Three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert were killed in the attack. A child and another teacher were wounded, police said.
Giamanco has since described conflicted feelings about the outcome. “I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” he told OPB. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome, but there were ones that I didn’t save.”
Lambert’s family addressed Giamanco directly in a statement read at the October news conference. “We want the bystander who intervened to know we know he is going through a rough time, but we are grateful, and we think he is a hero,” the family said. “You selflessly put yourself at risk for others.”
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