He heard the faint hum of a fluorescent light. "My nephew came this morning," she said, "6:30, fixed the door, wouldn't take a cent." A pause. "He said he watched the overnight footage when he came in. He cried." Another pause.
"He's 42 years old and works with his hands, and I have never once seen him cry. He cried watching a security camera tape of a man pick up a coffee cup." Dave closed his eyes. "I'll call the station," Brenda said. "You'll back up what I tell them." "I'll back up everything." Dave said.
Brenda exhaled. "Okay then." she said. "Let's let people see it." The San Bernardino Sun ran the story at 11:15 that morning with a clip of the footage 47 seconds from the moment the glass door came in to the moment Mike unzipped his jacket and the patches caught the light. The headline was careful and factual and completely insufficient for what the footage actually was.
It said "Security footage shows tense standoff at Barstow diner resolved without violence." By 2:00 p.m. the clip had been shared 14,000 times. By 6:00 p.m. it was on three national news channels. By midnight it had been viewed 11 million times across every platform that existed and several that had been invented specifically to share things like this. The 40 million came by the morning of the second day.
What nobody had anticipated not Dave, not Brenda, not the San Bernardino Sun's editor who had approved the clip with mild interest and gone to lunch was which 47 seconds people would keep watching. Not the moment the door came in, not the moment the guns came out. The moment Mike Callahan with a shotgun pointed at his face at close range picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. That moment, that specific unremarkable extraordinary gesture.
It was shared with captions that said things like this is the most unbothered human being alive and the audacity of this man and his coffee and from an account with 4 million followers I have watched this 17 times and I am a different person than I was before I started. The comments ran to hundreds of thousands. People from 43 countries, people who were 80 years old and people who were 16. Truck drivers and teachers and veterans and nurses and a retired judge in Memphis who wrote a three paragraph comment that ended, "I have spent 30 years on the bench watching people make the worst choices available to them in their worst moments." This man made the best choice available in his worst moment.
That is rarer than people know and more valuable than they give it credit for. Brenda Kowalski did four interviews in 2 days. She did them in her apron at the counter with her reading glasses pushed up on her head and she was the same in every one of them, direct, unembellished, exactly as she was. When the interviewer from a Los Angeles morning show asked her if she'd been scared, she said, "Of course I was scared.