An Oregon father who rushed into his daughters’ elementary school and shot a gunman made a desperate vow in newly released 911 audio, telling a dispatcher, “I have a gun, and I will shoot them right now.”
Kaylub Giamanco’s call captures the urgency outside Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend on Oct. 15, before the armed father intervened to stop an attack that killed three children and a teacher.
“Oh my god. Hello 911. Someone’s at the school. My daughter’s school with a gun,” Giamanco says in the recording released by the Deschutes 911 Service District.
The dispatcher urges him to wait for police.
“OK, tell me exactly what happened. Don’t do anything. Let me get an officer there, OK?” the dispatcher responds. “OK, I understand. Stay on the line with me.”
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As the call continues, voices can be heard discussing where the attacker is and whether he is firing.
“They’re on the south side, entering the building, right now,” Giamanco says, before warning that people are being shot.
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“Sir, I need you to tell me what’s going on. We have help en route,” the dispatcher says.
Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter whose two daughters attended the school, later told Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) he feared he would not survive going inside.
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“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 the outlet.
Giamanco entered the school with a .40-caliber pistol he legally kept in his vehicle and found a teacher struggling with the 16-year-old attacker, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said during an Oct. 16 news conference.
The teacher had thrown her cellphone at the gunman and tackled him before Giamanco shot him multiple times, according to the chief.
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Three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert were killed. A child and another teacher were wounded, police said.
For Giamanco, praise for stopping the gunman has come alongside anguish over those he could not save.
“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 praised the father’s intervention in a statement read during 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.”