Carpenter and Veteran Recounts Split-Second Response at Bend Elementary School
Sandego.net – A Bend father says he acted on instinct after seeing an armed teenager outside Silver Rail Elementary School, where his own children are enrolled. Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter and military veteran, ultimately confronted and killed the shooter after three students and a teacher had been fatally shot.
The attack occurred one week ago at the elementary school in central Oregon. Police said the 16-year-old gunman entered by shooting through glass panels in an exterior doorway. The teenager had previously attended the school as a special needs student, Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said.
Giamanco had not planned to be at the school that afternoon. He had packed lunch but chose to go home and eat with his wife instead. That decision placed him near Silver Rail Elementary at the moment the gunman appeared.
An Unplanned Encounter
Driving past the school, Giamanco saw the teenager carrying a shotgun. He remembered that he had a firearm in the center console of his truck, where it had been left unused for some time. The sight of the weapon and the proximity to the school pushed him into action.
The shooter threw the shotgun over a fence before climbing over it himself. Giamanco said fear quickly took hold as he realized what could happen inside the building.
“I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die.”
He climbed the fence with his own gun. Before reaching the building, he heard shots fired through the entry doors and then saw the teenager go inside. For Giamanco, the possibility that children were in danger became the focus of every decision that followed.
“I just was in full panic, like, ‘No, there’s children, there’s babies in there.’”
Inside the school, Giamanco moved forward while hearing children cry out and gunfire erupt. He described crawling faster as the danger unfolded, believing he might not survive the attempt to reach the shooter.
“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.”
Confrontation in a Special Education Classroom
Giamanco reached a special education classroom and found a teacher struggling with the shooter. He fired his weapon, causing both men to fall. The teacher then got up and escaped from the room.
Giamanco said the gunman was still trying to reach his firearm. Fearing that more people could be harmed, he fired twice more.
“He was scrambling for his weapon.”
“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.”
Police officers soon converged on the campus as sirens filled the area. Giamanco returned to his truck, placed his gun on the floorboard and began making calls to his family. The lunch he had intended to share with his wife was no longer possible; instead, he asked her to come to the school.
He also called his mother. Her response offered reassurance during a moment when he was struggling to process what had happened.
“Okay, baby, calm down. You did the right thing. You’re a hero. You saved lives.”
But Giamanco said he could not see the event in those simple terms. Four people had been killed before the shooting ended, and the losses have remained central to his thoughts.
“I didn’t save everybody. I didn’t get them all.”
The Lasting Weight of a School Tragedy
The shooting left a school community confronting the deaths of three students and a teacher, while families, staff members and first responders faced the immediate aftermath of violence in a place meant for learning and safety. Giamanco’s actions stopped the gunman, but they did not erase the trauma of the attack or the grief surrounding those who were killed.
For Giamanco, the memory remains intensely personal. His children attend Silver Rail Elementary, making the scene not simply an emergency he witnessed, but a threat to a community connected directly to his family.
He said the events continue to disrupt his sleep. The sounds and images of that day return at night, including the voices of children and the fear he felt as he moved toward the classroom.
“I relive, I see faces, I hear voices, I hear screams.”
His account illustrates the chaos of the minutes between an armed person entering a school and the arrival of law enforcement. It also underscores the lasting human impact of school shootings: the lives cut short, the survivors who carry the experience forward, and the families left to make sense of a tragedy that unfolded without warning.
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