The math amid the massacre: How Joshua Quick confronted the Tallahassee yoga studio gunman
Nada HassaneinIn a dim, spacious studio off Thomasville Road, yoga students stretched on their mats during a Friday Vinyasa flow class in November.
Joshua Quick, a Florida State University law school student, was there that evening with his girlfriend. Like other college students and local professionals, they gathered there to close the week on a peaceful note at Hot Yoga Tallahassee.
On the far end of the room, Quick and his girlfriend set their mats in front of each other. They took deep breaths, moved from child’s pose to cat-cow, facing the ground on all fours.
Quick noticed a man, who'd been lingering at the front desk asking the receptionist several questions, enter the yoga room. He could hear the man frantically ruffling through his bag. Quick dismissed it, assuming he was a newcomer trying to get his yoga mat out.
The instructor walked over to see if she could help.
Quick heard a scream. Glancing over, he saw the newcomer holding up a gun, almost as if to show it off. He held it there for what felt like a whole minute.
The yoga instructor gasped, “What are you doing?”
Her question was answered with gunfire.
Not a fighter
Nestled in the western corner on the second floor of the Betton Place plaza, the studio wasn’t the first place Quick had practiced yoga.
A former progressive care nurse, Quick, 33, moved to Tallahassee a couple years ago to attend law school. In his hometown of Phoenix, he grew up attending the Self-Realization Fellowship, a temple founded by an Indian guru where followers do Kriya yoga.
For him, yoga is a personal, spiritual practice.
“Yoga is something that comes from other places, you know,” he said last week, a day before flying to Washington, D.C. for the State of the Union on an invite from Congressman Al Lawson. “It’s more of an internal journey than it is a way to get washboard abs.”
For a decade, Quick also was a Kung Fu student and assistant instructor. He started out of intrigue for the martial art’s east Asian roots. Like yoga, Kung Fu became a meditative, mental exercise for Quick as much as it was a physical one.
“I think when I first went in, I had this mentality like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to learn how to fight,’ but then, you know, it just— it totally changes you,” he said. “I never considered myself to be a fighter.”
Details made public Wednesday of an exhaustive three-month investigation into the Nov. 2 mass shooting at the yoga studio conclusively found otherwise.
Quick's snap decision to confront the gun-wielding assailant changed the trajectory of tragedy that day.
"We’re thankful for the actions of the victim who intervened and fought back, giving people the opportunity to escape," Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo said during a news conference in advance of the release of the final 262-page investigative report. "It’s all hypothetical, but that may have caused (the gunman) to panic and take his own life instead of continuing on attacking other people.”
Final report:
- Tallahassee yoga studio shooting: TPD report reveals gunman planned 'horrific event' for months
- 'Please hurry': Frantic 911 calls followed mass shooting at Hot Yoga Tallahassee
- Read TPD's report on the Tallahassee yoga shooting
A week before the report was released, Quick sat down with the Tallahassee Democrat. He opened up about what he felt and saw during the massacre that ended with Florida State student Maura Binkley and Capital Health Plan's Dr. Nancy Van Vessem dead and Quick and four others injured.
'I just wanted to hit him'
Quick and his girlfriend ended up in the 5:30 p.m. Hot Yoga flow class by chance.
They'd registered for the wrong class — an aerial yoga session taught at a different time. Shuffling in that Friday evening, running a bit late, they made the switch at the front desk and headed around the corner to the main yoga room.
The chaos that unfolded in the tranquil space over the next few minutes seemed to Quick to last an eternity.
When the shooting started, he saw the class instructor bang on the wall to alert the front desk before taking cover in an alcove with a window looking out onto the balcony where yoga supplies were kept.
His girlfriend ducked behind him. He kicked the thick picture window next to him, but it was too solid to break through. With the only door on the other side of the studio, there was no escape from the spray of bullets.
Quick's field of vision narrowed and locked onto the hulking man in the red FSU shirt and grey athletic shorts firing.
“I saw no blood. I saw no bodies,” he said. “I just saw him — and I just wanted to hit him.”
He did the calculations and muted his fear.
“What’s the other alternative? That he shoots all of us? There is a mathematical factor to this,” Quick said.
“I knew I was going to get shot. I was 100 percent certain. I’m going to hit this guy, he’s going to shoot me. If you’re doing the math, it’s like, I get shot — but some people get out.”
He grabbed the first thing he saw to weaponize against the shooter: a vacuum.
The lean, 5-foot-8 Quick used it to hit the tall, heavy-set shooter who fought back, pistol whipping him. Quick fell to the ground. During the struggle, other students — the ones who could — took the opportunity to flee out the door.
Quick jumped up, found a broom and struck the gunman's head. They were square with each other. Quick heard a click. The attacker looked down, fumbling with his gun.
“I thought it was just a jammed bullet," Quick said. "I thought he would just cock it back and get it cleared and then shoot me."
The gun, however, had malfunctioned. The shooter was distracted and Quick bolted. He didn’t notice his blood-stained shirt, or the temporary blindness in his left eye from the blow to his head.
He and other victims made it downstairs and inside the kitchen of the Bar at Betton. Within minutes, law enforcement and paramedics arrived.
Before he was thwarted, the gunman killed Binkley and Van Vessem and injured four other women — one was shot five times — all of whom were total strangers. Carrying more than 100 rounds of ammunition, he meant to do more harm, but the last bullet fired by Scott Beierle was into his own head.
The grim statistics:
- Tallahassee included on list of 307 mass shootings in 311 days
- 10 days, 4 hate crimes: Tallahassee yoga shooter part of violent national trend
Touched by tragedy
Quick wears a tangled-metal bangle on his wrist said to curb negative influences. He’s not entirely convinced of its power, but he wears it to be mindful.
The evening at the yoga studio was not the first time he was touched by tragedy.
When he got home late that night, Quick opened social media to find a photo of his late brother. The shooting fell on the 12-year anniversary of the death of his brother, Jason Whitehouse, a Marine killed in Iraq.
He recalled his sister Rachel Michael, who ran the 2013 Boston Marathon when a bomb exploded near the finish line killing three people and injuring others. She was back two miles, unscathed, but her brush with an attack and his brother's death resonated.
“Psychologically, I’m kind of aware that life can kind of be taken in an instant,” Quick said. “But, I really didn’t think this would happen to me."
The yoga students who were in the class check in on each other and meet from time to time, Quick said. After Tuesday's news conference at TPD headquarters, his girlfriend and others cried hearing the details and recalling their escape.
Quick remembered the eerie way the shooter held up his gun before he began firing.
“It’s like he wants us to see this gun," he said. "I think he really wanted to just basically impose he had power."
Those flashbacks strike when Quick is stressed with schoolwork but overall, he said, “I think I’m doing just fine.”
He and his girlfriend have been attending trauma therapy. He was on the way to a session when he got the call from Lawson's office inviting him to the State of the Union. Three months since the calamity, the gestures of support and gratitude haven't stopped.
“It always catches me off guard,” he said. “It’s always at a mundane moment and I just think, 'Oh it’s just going to be a normal day.' ”
He was awarded a Key to the City by the City Commission, and FSU granted him $30,000 toward his law degree. A GoFundMe for the victims was set up, and he received a bag of gifts from Hot Yoga’s owner and staff.
Last week, he checked the mail to find an envelope embossed with Carnegie Melon’s red lettering. Inside was a nomination notice for the prestigious Carnegie Hero Medal, awarded since 1904 to citizens who risk their lives saving or trying to save others.
He is overwhelmingly grateful. But what happened at the studio, he said, didn't make him a better or worse person.
It was just what he had to do.
Reach Nada Hassanein at nhassanein@tallahassee.com or on Twitter @nhassanein_.
COMING TOMORROW
The FBI. The military. The judicial system. School districts. The dangerous and hateful behavior of the man who launched the random attack at Hog Yoga Tallahassee last year made it on the radar of each institution intended to keep people safe. But that didn’t happen. Read about the danger signs and what went wrong in Sunday’s Tallahassee Democrat.