Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported the 29-year-old gunman who opened fire at the Wilshire Police Station in Mid-City Los Angeles has died from his injuries sustained during the shoot out.

Daniel C. Yealu, the police discovered, had an AK-47 with more ammunition in the trunk of his car parked at the police station and a complete cache of weapons at his Palms Apartment, in West Los Angeles. He had intended on killing everyone that night at the police station, angered at being rejected from the police academy.

My son was at the police station April 7th, when the shooting occurred. He and his fellow Olympic Park Neighborhood Councilmembers had gathered there, as they always do, for their monthly meeting.

The news that Yealu has died, brought back my imagined imagery of that Monday night. My son crouched under a table for 10 minutes, fearing for his life. Other council members, mothers, also crouched in fear, shaking and crying and holding hands waiting for whatever was to come next. One bullet had penetrated the room in which the council members were meeting.

It also brought to mind the various random intersections we have with people. Yealu and my son were in the same building that night. For whatever reason, time and place had brought them together, at this specific point in time. The police officer that was wounded that night has recovered from his injuries; my son has moved on his life, but with a chilling experience that will stay with him forever. And now, Yealu has died.

Before I had children, I volunteered as a “Candy Striper” at the UCLA Medical Center. I don’t know why hospitals still call these volunteers “Candy Stripers” as certainly my uniform was not red striped at all, but merely a blue UCLA hospital smock, white polyester pants and comfortable shoes.

Every Thursday night for two years, I would check in at the hospital for a floor assignment. I would go from room to room, checking in on patients: getting them water or ice; emptying bed pans or removing their meal from the tray table at their bed. Sometimes, I would just sit and talk to the patients, and in doing so, befriended many African American youths with sickle cell anemia. I learned about all sorts of conditions and diseases I knew nothing about. The most interesting to me was a condition where a patient could no longer eat, as food could not be digested through the stomach and it would instead end of up the patient’s lungs.

I always noticed how blasé the nurses appeared. They would simply walk right by when patients were screaming for help. They seemed to spend more time entrenched in their paperwork and chatting it up at the nurse’s station.

On one particular Thursday night, I heard an elderly man calling from his room for help. I entered. I cannot remember his name and I cannot even remember what he looked like now, but he was in great pain. I left him to try and convince a nurse to assist. “He can wait,” she said. “I’ll get to him later.”

I re-entered the man’s room and stayed there with him for a while. I checked the various machines of which he was attached. His vital signs were diminishing and his pain was increasing. He was dying.

Once again I alerted the nurses to the situation. None were available to assist him.

So, I just went back and sat with him, for a long time. And I put my arms around him and spoke to him, my face very near his, searching for something to say. I was younger then, maybe 25, and such comforting words did not come as easily to me then as they do now. He died in my arms.

It was the first time I had ever seen anyone die. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone dead.

I sat there for a while after thinking about how our lives had randomly intersected. Had I not been there he would have died alone. If we were to each have a visual trajectory of our lives, my somewhat unremarkable Thursday night at the hospital would intersect with a most important axis point his life line–when it stopped.

And that is when my unremarkable existence at the hospital that night, and our interchange, became remarkable.

“The patient in room 525 had died,” I eventually told the nurses.

“OK. Thanks. We’ll get to him, soon,” one replied.