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By Krishnan Iyer
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There is a photograph on my phone, timestamped 5:57 p.m., of a food stall banner at the Bite of Seattle festival. The Viral Hot Cheeto Balls. I sent it to my daughter as a joke. She had given up on that line hours earlier, and I had quietly decided to go back for her.
Her reply came back three letters long. OMH. She meant OMG. She types fast.
Three minutes after that, everybody around me was running.
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Gunfire erupted outside the Armory at Seattle Center. My wife and kids weren’t with me; they’d gone inside the building to use the bathroom and had just come back outside when the shooting began. Seven people were shot. Three of them died. A 2-year-old was shot in the arm and went home from the hospital the next night, KOMO News reported. My family was roughly 20 steps away.
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Something grabbed my hand while I was running. A kid's hand. I ran a block with it, assuming I had somebody else's child and would sort it out when we stopped. It was my son. My daughter had spotted me from the doorway, pointed me out to him, told him to go, and turned to get her mother. She had about three seconds to do all of that.
We all walked out safely. But several others didn’t, and I think about that every day. What I want to share is not the story of what happened but the list of things we got wrong.
Start with the phone my son does not have. He carries no phone and wears no watch. If my daughter had not happened to see me, my son would have gone into that crowd looking for his parents with no way to call anyone. I have not been able to finish that thought since July 26, the day of the shooting.
My wife and I are getting our son a smartwatch that can make calls. He can wear it, so he won’t leave it on a bench, and it will not become a games console in his pocket the way a phone would. If that is not where your family lands, then I suggest you give your kid one specific place to stand and wait in case of an emergency, and say the plan out loud in the parking lot before you walk in.
Second: We had never decided who takes whom. A teenager made those calls in three seconds, under gunfire, because her parents had not made them in advance. Next time, we will do it at the kitchen table.
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For more than a week now, I have told this story as if my daughter improvised, and I quietly congratulated myself for how she was raised. Neither is true. She did not improvise. She has been rehearsing for a moment like this since she was a small child, in the lockdown drills that every American public school now runs. Where you go. Who you move. What you do about the ones who freeze. My own school in Mumbai never drilled us for anything.
So that’s the third thing I got wrong: I have complained about those drills, run by teachers who fit them in around everything else we ask of them, for years. And on the day of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, one of them got my family out of Seattle Center safely. That is not a comfortable thing to be grateful for. I am grateful for it anyway. If you have a school-aged kid, they may know more about how to respond in these situations than you do. Ask them.
The one thing I got right was boring: I knew the streets. I did not work out a route while people were screaming because I already had one: west, then south, then into a concrete parking garage that has two entrances. This is the new plan: 15 seconds after we walk into anywhere crowded, I will identify the exits and the nearest wall, and I will say it to the people I came with.
Then there was what came afterward. The four of us reacted in four different ways. My son wanted to talk about what had happened immediately and did not stop for hours. My daughter wanted to leave, then wanted silence, and got five hours of it behind her door. My wife needed to say it all out loud. I stood on a sidewalk and explained probabilities to my terrified family, which I can now see was at least partly for my own benefit.
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We almost got that wrong by treating one of these responses as correct. All four were correct. Do not make the quiet one talk.
Our daughter’s silence eventually broke, and it was not because of anything we did. Two of her friends came over that night. One brought Taco Bell. An hour later she was out of her room, talking to all of us on her own terms. Another friend turned up the next morning with coffee and a cheese sandwich. My advice to any other parents who find themselves in this situation? Let their people in the house.
Sunday cost me something I cannot buy back: My kids will walk into crowds for the rest of their lives wondering who in there is armed.
My wife grew up in Delhi on the buses. I grew up in Mumbai on the trains. Neither of us had a childhood where going out in the world was optional, and our children were never going to get one here, even though the easy thing to do in the suburbs is to stay inside the bubble. But that is not how I want to raise my children.
Sunday tested that idea, but I have not changed my mind. My children are still living in my house, which means my wife and I are there to help—to get them counselors, or to let their friends come over, or have their grandmother talk to them. But I know that soon my daughter will be in some crowd without me, in a city I do not know, and I will not be in the room with her afterward. I must trust that the lessons she is learning now will help her in the future, too.
Krishnan Iyer is an engineering leader turned social entrepreneur working on homelessness in Bellevue, Washington. He serves on the board of Hopelink, previously Bellevue LifeSpring, and writes and produces The Mosaic Mind, a podcast and newsletter.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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