Former Republican Senator and Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen was present at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at the time of today’s shooting, Canada.com reports. Apparently his wife had written a play that was about to open:

Former U.S. defence secretary William Cohen was at the museum at the time of Wednesday’s shooting, in advance of the planned opening of a play his wife had written about Anne Frank and Emmitt Till, a black teenager lynched in 1955 by white supremacists in Money, Miss.

“I just heard the shots ring out and ducked,” Cohen told CNN. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was to have attended the play’s opening.

I’d like to take this opportunity to again praise the guards, including the late Steven Tyrone Johns, who stopped the attack before it spread past security. Had it not been for their defiance against the attacker, Lord knows how many lives may have been lost throughout the museum. They, especially Johns who lost his life in the attack, are truly heroes.