Authorities released a dramatic 911 call in which a heroic father reported a gunman at his daughter’s Oregon school before confronting the shooter.
Kaylub Giamanco told the dispatcher that there is “someone with a gun” at his daughter’s school, Silver Trail Elementary, just before 1 p.m. on October 15, according to audio released on Tuesday, October 3.
“I have a gun and I will shoot them right now,” Giamanco, 36, said as he was driving home for lunch.
The operator then asked Gianmaco to not get involved, but the father refused to stay back. “This is my daughter’s school!” he shouted. “I’m about to go kill this kid.”
When Giamanco was asked if he knew the identity of the gunman, he said, “No I don’t f***ing know I was just driving to the school.”
Giamanco told the operator that the shooter – who has since been identified as 16-year-old Griffin J. John – was breaching the building. “They’re on the south side entering the building right now,” he said.
“Is he shooting?” the dispatcher asked, and Gianmaco confirmed that shots had been fired.
The 911 operator tried to learn more information and asked for a physical description of the shooter, but Gianmaco never answered before the call was cut off.
Giamanco ultimately went after John, who was armed with his mother’s shotgun, and fatally shot him.
Officers got to the school at 1:02 p.m., which was just four minutes after John was first spotted climbing the fence and two minutes after Giamanco called to report the shooting. Upon their arrival, police officers said that John was dead.
Before he was stopped, John shot through locked doors and killed three children and a teacher in a special needs classroom. One other student was critically wounded, while another teacher was injured.
Giamanco has since been praised for stopping the shooter, and he opened up about the horrific experience while speaking to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
“I just was in full panic, like, ‘No, there’s children, there’s babies in there,’” he recalled.
Giamanco said that when he saw John climbing the school fence, the “panic fled into my brain, and that’s when I opened my center console.”
“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 went to the special education classroom and saw a teacher struggling with John. He then shot at John and the teacher ran out of the room.
“He was scrambling for his weapon,” Giamanco said of John. “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.”
