In a delicate moment in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance briefly exchanged condolences as Walz recounted a time when his teenage son witnessed a shooting.

While talking about guns during the first and only vice presidential debate of the year, Walz described school shootings as parents’ “worst nightmare” before revealing that his teenage son Gus had witnessed gun violence up close.

“Look, I have a 17-year-old who witnessed a shooting at a community center while he was playing volleyball,” Walz said, to which Vance quickly responded “terrible.” “These things don’t let you go,” Walz added.

The incident Walz was referring to occurred in January 2023 at the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center in St. Paul, near Central High School, where his son was a student. During an argument outside the building, 27-year-old recreation center employee Exavir Binford Jr. shot 16-year-old JuVaughn Turner in the head.

According to court documents, two teenagers got into a fight at the recreation center that escalated into Binford shooting Turner before fleeing the scene.

Turner survived, but suffered permanent brain damage and now suffers violent seizures, according to his family. In February 2024, Binford was sentenced to more than ten years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree assault. At the sentencing, an attorney representing Turner’s mother revealed that Turner underwent surgery to remove part of his skull.

Although Walz had mentioned the incident before, this was the first time he discussed it on a national level. Previously, in a Sept. 12 campaign speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Walz criticized Vance for calling school shootings a “fact of life” in America and for speaking out after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. for increased school security.

“Think about it – families are broken forever. Too many of us were there,” Walz told his supporters last month. “My own son was in a place where someone was shot in the head. Too many of us have experienced this.”

The shooting at the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center became a central point in broader discussions about gun control in Minnesota. Walz, once a darling of the NRA, has since become far more progressive on gun issues and has become a vocal advocate for giving local governments more authority over firearms restrictions in public spaces. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio earlier this year, he supported policies that would allow cities like St. Paul to ban guns in areas like recreation centers.

“As a parent of a juvenile who was in that facility, I think it would have been a good decision to keep those firearms out there,” Walz said in the MPR interview.

The Walz-Vance debate stood in stark contrast to the more combative debate on September 10 between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Both Walz and Vance avoided personal attacks and found common ground on multiple occasions, resulting in significantly less adversarial exchanges.