Brandon Tsay, the man who disarmed the Monterey Park shooter speaks out
Brandon Tsay is a hero. As Saturday night’s Lunar New Year celebrations were coming to an end at his family’s dance studio, Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in Alhambra, California, 26-year-old Tsay turned around and saw a man holding a gun.
“My first thought was I was going to die here, this is it,” Tsay said in an interview with Good Morning America.
According to Tsay, the gunman didn’t seem to be looking to rob anyone but he was “looking for targets — people to harm.”
“He started prepping the weapon and something came over me,” Tsay recalled to ABC News’ Robin Roberts during an interview Monday. “I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him. I needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else everybody would have died. When I got the courage, I lunged at him with both my hands, grabbed the weapon and we had a struggle. We struggled into the lobby, trying to get this gun away from each other. He was hitting me across the face, bashing the back of my head.”
After Tsay successfully disarmed the gunman, he pointed the gun at the gunman and shouted, “Get the hell out of here! I’ll shoot! Get away! Go!”
“I was shaking all night. I couldn’t believe what happened,” Tsay continued. “A lot of people have been telling me how much courage I had to confront a situation like this. But you know what courage is? Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to have adversity to fear when fearful events happen such as this.”
Offering some words of encouragement, Tsay said, “In crises like this, the people need courage, especially the victims, their friends, their families. My heart goes out to everybody involved, especially the people in Star Dance Studio and Monterey Park. I hope they can find the courage and the strength to persevere.”
“It was just my son. He could have died,” Brandon’s father, Tom Tsay, told The New York Times, also saying he was proud of his son for his courage. “He’s lucky, someone was watching over him.”
