UNREAL Story: Christian And Parker Braun, Brothers Who Play For Kansas And Missouri Hoops, Plus One Of Their Friends Saved A Man's Life As He Was Attempting To Jump Off A Building
[Rivals] - Christian, a freshman basketball player at Kansas, had played a game with the Jayhawks and had some time off afterward. He used it to watch his brother and visit Parker and Johnson, a sophomore at Mizzou. After the Tigers’ game (none of them remembered exactly which one it was), the three friends went to eat in downtown Columbia and were walking back toward their car.
"And we look up, and like this dude's like on the edge of the parking garage, and we're like, ‘Is he gonna jump?’”
Some five or six stories up, a man was perched on the edge of the parking garage’s top floor. Since the city completed a garage at the corner of 5th & Walnut Streets, six people have committed suicide by jumping from the garages in downtown Columbia. On this night, a man who Johnson said he thought was in his late 20s or early 30s was going to become the seventh.
When the two got to the top level of the garage, they saw the man was wearing a backpack.
It was Johnson who approached the man. He grabbed the backpack, assuming that the weight of it and the momentum would carry the man back off the ledge. Johnson pulled the man off the ledge and immediately tried to hold him down.
Just an absolutely unreal story here that I'm glad Rivals and Gabe DeArmond shared. Think about what you were doing in college - getting drunk, trying to get laid, avoiding class, things of that nature. You're a little selfish in college since you're finally on your own and just living without rules for 4 years. How many people would stop hearing a commotion? Not many.
That's where it starts. The fact that they noticed there was this problem and decided to fix it. The biggest of shout outs to the Braun brothers and their friend Max Johnson. Not only that, but to have the quick thinking of keeping someone on the ground to talk to the guy and the other two running up there to drag him off the ledge. I couldn't imagine how I, my brother, any of my friends, whatever, would react in that scenario.
How about this quote:
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“I’ve done some cool things with those guys,” Johnson said. “Playing basketball, we won state championships. But when we were at the top of the parking garage, that was the coolest moment, because we just saved someone’s life.”
That just puts everything in perspective in a way of what they did. You're talking about 19-20 year olds saving someone's life and that's fucking awesome. No jokes to be made here, nothing of that sort. Just a shout out to the Braun brothers and Johnson for being humans.
Everyone goes through shit at some point. There's no shame in that or anything. If you are, reach out to people, you never know who is willing to help. Again, shout out Max Johnson and the Braun brothers.