Watch Brandon Tsay disarmed a mass killer – Now he is Biden’s guest at State of the Union
Brandon Tsay had not slept. As he lay in the quiet bedroom of his childhood home, he tried to wrap his head around the previous night.
He had disarmed a mass shooter, aided police investigators for hours and finally returned home, only to find himself wide awake when he crawled into bed.
“I was still trying to contemplate what had just happened to me, what had I just done?” Tsay said.
The 26-year-old replayed the events: hearing the click of metal when a stranger entered his family’s Alhambra dance studio; staring into the armed man’s empty, menacing eyes; wresting the gun away; the shock and despair as news spread of the massacre that had occurred just a few miles away.
A video frame grab from a surveillance camera at the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in Alhambra shows Brandon Tsay disarming a gunman.(Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio)
He had no idea how those seconds of wrestling with the gunman would change his life.
Within hours, reporters were camped outside his house. His phone exploded with calls, texts and emails. President Biden phoned, thanking him for his bravery. He appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and in the New York Times. Gov. Gavin Newsom visited him in person, as did news anchor Lester Holt, who interviewed him for the “NBC Nightly News.” Then the invitation arrived for Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
It has been a lot to take in for a young man who prefers playing “League of Legends” with friends and building personal computers to public speaking — someone his family said always placed them ahead of himself, was devoted to his mother through the cancer that eventually killed her and worked nights at the family dance hall to keep it going.
Disarming the gunman happened naturally, he said. What happened next was surreal.
“Having those reporters outside, mobs of them, constantly asking me, ‘Hey, can you talk about it? What happened that night? What was the guy like? How did you deal with this situation?’ ” Tsay recalled. “It was just reliving a trauma.”
For as long as he can remember, Tsay and his older sister, Brenda Tsay, 27, have been fixtures at Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio. His paternal grandmother, Eng Chen Tsay, opened the business in the 1990s after emigrating from Taiwan. His mother, Yvonne Hwei Fung Lin, managed the studio and worked the front office.
The siblings would do their schoolwork there. As a boy, Tsay took waltz and modern dance lessons — though he wasn’t much of a dancer, he said. The two would chat up the much older patrons of Lai Lai, who came not only to dance but to socialize.
As teens, Tsay and his sister began helping their mother clean and work the cash register.
“Growing up, Brandon was more the self-sacrificial one in the family,” Brenda said.
But everything changed when their mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Tsay was a first-year student at Pasadena City College when his mother sat him down in the family living room where she liked to play piano and explained how she had visited the doctor with chest and throat pain. The diagnosis was devastating: Stage 3, and the cancer had spread. It was terminal, the doctor told her.
Tsay immediately dropped his classes, though Lin insisted his sister finish her degree at the University of Washington.
“The life of my mother is more important than reading books,” Tsay said.
For the next two years, he sought treatments for his mother from more than 10 doctors in three countries, including Japan, where she received experimental stem cell therapy. His father, Tom Tsay, stayed in California, earning money from his legal practice to fund the medical procedures and travel.
Tsay and his mother lived in Taiwan, and she seemed to be fighting the cancer successfully, the doctors said.
“At first, she was getting better throughout the treatment,” Tsay said. “But life has unexpected turns, and it just happened so quick. She felt so weak and sick, and she was admitted to hospital, and then that night, she didn’t make it.”
His mother died in December 2017. She was 54. Tsay was with her as his father and sister FaceTimed from the United States.
Tsay took time to grieve after returning to San Marino but quickly found himself back at Lai Lai, filling the managerial void. Though his future was uncertain, he knew he did not want to run the business permanently. Still, he settled in and kept busy handing tickets to customers, taking care of accounting and payroll and doing repairs around the 30-year-old studio.
That’s how he ended up there the night before the Lunar New Year, when many his age would have been out celebrating. He was the youngest person there by decades, tending to the family business out of a sense of duty and love of the dance hall where he grew up.
Amid the chaos, it has been jarring without his mother, Tsay said. She was his emotional rock, and it’s hard sharing his feelings with the rest of his family.
He has nightmares about guns, startled awake one morning after ramming his arms into the bed frame, as if he were in a fight for his life.
“I would feel more open to talk to my mom about it … about my feelings at the time, my feelings after, how scared I was, how scared I still am,” he said, sighing and trailing off.
