COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KOAA) — When Michael Hagiwara recounts the events of Nov. 27, 2015 he hardly thinks of himself as a hero. For him, his actions were out of instinct.
“I have spent so many years in health care, so many years as a nurse in the emergency department, I felt compelled to do something,” Hagiwara said.
He was getting his eyeglasses fitted inside a medical office building with his daughter who was three at the time when all of a sudden a woman rushed inside.
“I think her exact words were, Oh my God he has a gun and he’s shooting people, at first I thought she must be mistaken, this is a very poorly timed joke, but looking at her face I realized that she was in significant distress, something bad had happened,” Hagiwara said.
A gunman had opened fire in the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood clinic and made his way inside the clinic. Hagiwara was next door inside the office building.
Hagiwara said the doors were locked at the eye doctor’s office and they sheltered in place.
“I was thinking more about, what am I going to do if something bad happens in here? How am I going to get my daughter out?” Hagiwara said.
He looked out the door into the lobby and saw a woman stumble inside and fall down onto the title floor of the lobby. That’s when he realized she was a shooting victim and it was time for him to do something. At the time, Hagiwara was an ER charge nurse at Penrose Hospital.
“My experience and my training told me, you can’t just let someone bleed out on the floor and not try to do something about it,” Hagiwara said, “please believe me, I’m not trying to play a hero, but I have spent so many years in health care, so many years as a nurse in the emergency department, I felt compelled to do something.”
He left his daughter with a medical assistant in the eye clinic and went to take care of the woman who had been shot.
“Generally when someone has a penetrating wound like a gunshot, you’re controlling bleeding, replacing fluids, things like that, and I didn’t have any of that available,” Hagiwara said.
He would take his down jacket off and he applied that to the wound and held pressure. While he was helping the woman, he realized his own safety could be at risk.
“I was out in the lobby with the victim, just the two of us. And I remember looking at this back door, and I just remember, like, wow, we're really in exposed position here. If this person comes in through this door, this is going to be a tragedy,” Hagiwara said.
A doctor and a medical assistant from a family practice upstairs came down to help.
“I asked them, do we have any wound care supplies? Do we have any IV gear?” Hagiwara recalled. The medical assistant returned with an IV gear and they were able to apply a dressing to the wound.
“There was really no chaos, there was no screaming. It was nothing like you would see on TV,” Hagiwara said.
Time passed for Hagiwara and he started to get concerned for the woman’s safety.
“The SWAT team came in with their gear, and you know, the ballistic shields and we actually used that as a stretcher to move them out to this armored vehicle,” he said.
A Colorado Springs Police Officer was outside the front door of the medical office building, Hagiwara saw another man who was crawling, Hagiwara made eye contact with him and brought him inside to get help.
His experience as an emergency room nurse kicked in to high gear, he said he realized he was adept at prioritizing what needed to be done, like stopping the bleeding.
“You look at it more as a clinical scientific exercise, though also you have to keep your compassion. You have to remember that your patient is also a human being, that has a mother, they have a father, they’ve got a spouse, they’ve got kids, you have to keep that in mind,” Hagiwara said.
Hagiwara was honored for his quick actions at a Colorado Springs City Council meeting in January 2016 where he was credited with saving lives.
Years later, he still rejects the term hero.
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