Lessons from a Crisis

Published in WAMOA Journal, Fall 2018:

Some of life’s most important lessons come out of tragedy or crisis. That certainly was the case for Brady Olson as he reacted to an armed teen firing shots in his school.

In the days and weeks after the incident, the North Thurston High School teacher says, he reflected on “just how important your community is, and how important relationships are, and what truly matters both personally and professionally.”

So his main message for WAMOA’s 2018 conference was about “thoughtful understanding of people around us,” he says in an interview before the conference.

“We are so great at coming together over tragedy,” he remarks. “We’re so good at tying a yellow ribbon when we have the troops away at war. We’re so good at being nice to one another after a tragic event.

“The takeaway that I want to bring is, Let’s be proactive rather than reactive. Let’s understand that everyone is bringing the best person they can, and everybody is sending their best kid to school. Let’s just do what we can to appreciate what people bring to the table rather than harboring resentment, which we’re very good at.

“That’s something we really have to work on. You really have to work on appreciating the people around you, and especially – and that’s why I love these conferences – in a work environment. We get so involved in ourselves sometimes, and if we can really appreciate one another, it makes what we do easier.”

Olson was starting what seemed like just another workday on April 27, 2015, when, shortly before 7:30 a.m., a gunshot rang out from a stairwell near the school’s common area.

“That shot initiated my reaction, as well as my principal’s and the dean of students’. We were on the other side at another stairwell, and I immediately ran across the common to that stairwell,” he says. “I was going to run up the stairs to see what was going on. We ran across and I was at the foot of the stairs when he came down the stairs with a .357 Magnum in hand.”

With hundreds of students in the area ahead of 7:30 classes, Olson felt a duty to take action if he could. As it turned out, he could and did.

Through a window, Olson could see the teenage shooter descending the stairwell. After the youth reached the bottom of the stairs and fired a second shot, Olson tackled him.

“I was going to sweep his right hand and knock the gun out of his hand, that was my thought,” Olson recalls. “And as I ran at him and hit him from the back, or more the side, and brought my right hand down in sort of a chopping motion, he didn’t let the gun go. We went to the ground and fought for the gun.

“I was able to get the gun from him. I pinned his head with my forearm into the floor. He was on his front. I looked up at my best friend, he’s our dean of students, and I moved to slide the gun across the floor to him so I could have a free hand, and that’s when our school resource officer, who had been in a position to fire with pressure on the trigger but didn’t fire because he couldn’t get what’s called a clean backstop of the students from behind, initiated putting him into custody.”

The school went into lockdown, local police took the shooter into custody, and luckily there were no fatalities (no one was shot) – though absentee rates skyrocketed in the days afterward. The 17-year-old boy who fired the shots was sentenced a few months later to 2.5 to three years in a state juvenile facility after he pleaded guilty to several felonies, and was released earlier this year.

The dramatic episode on that April morning changed the lives of many. Olson’s brave and decisive action garnered him a Governor’s Lifesaving Award, among other accolades. But the awards and recognition constitute just a small part of how his life changed in a minute.

Olson says he “can’t even begin to describe” the incident’s impact and effect. “From a personal standpoint with my family, I think there’s no question it brought us closer together. I hadn’t talked to my brother in seven years because of stupid brother stuff, and he called me that night… It made me take stock on that part of my life. You hear all the time that ‘life is too short.’ I don’t know why you need something like that to have that realization.

“My takeaway from it, as far as relationships at work, is that I got to see some of my fellow teachers do amazing things – I mean truly amazing things. I got to see them care about kids like I’d never witnessed before, and it absolutely washed away some resentments and annoyances over stupid stuff. Being able to see what they did, and their caring, you kind of look at it and go ‘My thought about that is really stupid when you put it in perspective.’

“I can’t tell you how much perspective it’s brought to my life, and continues to.”