(CNN) — The good Samaritan who killed a gunman after three students and a teacher were fatally shot at an elementary school recalled his final, desperate choice to Oregon Public Broadcasting: “I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die.”
“I just was in full panic, like, ‘No, there’s children, there’s babies in there,’” Kaylub Giamanco told OPB in an exclusive interview.
A week ago, a 16-year-old shooter forced his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in the central Oregon city of Bend by firing into the glass panes of an external set of doors, according to police. The shooter was a former special needs student at the school, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said.
Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter and military veteran whose children attend the school, followed the suspect and shot him to death.
A bit of happenstance had Giamanco drive by the school that afternoon.
He said he had decided to go home for lunch with his wife despite having packed a meal. As he was driving by the school, Giamanco said he saw the shooter carrying a shotgun, and thought of the gun he had “collecting dust” in his truck console, quickly springing into action.
When the teen shooter hurled his shotgun over the school fence before climbing over it, Giamanco said, “panic fled into my brain, and that’s when I opened my center console.”
He jumped the fence with his gun and heard the shooter fire through the doors before seeing him enter 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 told OPB.
When Giamanco made it inside the school, he crawled to the special education classroom, where he saw a teacher struggling with the shooter. He fired his weapon. The teacher and the shooter went down. Then the teacher got up and ran out.
“He was scrambling for his weapon,” Giamanco told OPB, referring to the shooter. “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.”
Sirens filled the air as police descended on the school. Giamanco returned to his truck, put his gun on the floorboard and called his wife to say he wasn’t coming home for lunch. He asked her to come to the school. He then called his mom.
“She was just like, ‘Okay, baby, calm down. You did the right thing. You’re a hero. You saved lives,’” Giamanco told OPB. “And I was just like, “I didn’t save everybody. I didn’t get them all.’”
And the experience still keeps him up at night, “I relive, I see faces, I hear voices, I hear screams,” he said.
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