Safety First News
Articles
Crystal Brame
by Peninsula Gateway
Bill Kortenbach’s eyes tear up and his lips tighten and tremble. To keep from collapsing into a full cry, he has to pause in telling the story about the day he met Crystal Brame.
“I looked into her eyes and I saw hopelessness,” he said this week. “I could feel her oppression like a lead blanket. She had an incredible heaviness of spirit.”
Kortenbach teaches the one-day personal protection course that Crystal Brame had signed up to take on Sunday, April 27.
But just 17 hours before the training that might have saved her life, her husband, Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, murdered her in front of their two children in the Harbor Plaza parking lot and then committed suicide.
Kortenbach is confident his program, Courage Quest, would have benefited Brame.
“Nobody knows what would have happened. If someone has a gun and wants to kill you, they’ll most likely be successful, he said. “But if Crystal had acted on the feelings she expressed to me, she may not have been in that parking lot.”
Kortenbach and his business partner George Warnell know there are many other Crystal Brame’s out there – afraid to come out, living in fear – because they’ve helped many other battered women through their course. Courage Quest is a full-force adrenalin experience that teaches mostly women to become more aware of their environment. It heightens a person’s intuition, and trains them to trust and act on those feelings. Friends concerned for Brame’s safety told her about the program, which Kortenbach and Warnell conduct on one Sunday every month in the studios of the Gig Harbor Karate Academy. Both Kortenbach and Warnell also teach at the Academy.
Kortenbach spent an unusually long time with Brame, about a half-hour, explaining the course and listening to her talk about her fears. Kortenbach advised her to disappear until the divorce was over. “She felt her life was so complex; she didn’t think she could do it,” he said. “But if she could have seen the future, she would have done whatever was necessary.”
Kortenbach gave Brame his phone number and invited her to call if she needed help. She never did.
“Something good has to come of this,” he said. “Making people aware – even if that's the only good. Nobody deserves that to happen to them.”
When the heroes of Flight 93 charged the cockpit taken over by Islamic terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, and probably saved a horrorific jetliner crash into The White House, Bill Kortenbach and George Warnell knew they had to do something to make the world a safer place.
“I believe there’s a hero inside every human being,” says Warnell, who worked as a flight attendant for 12 years.
To prevent future 9/11s, they realized, more heroes like those on Flight 93 would have to rise up. Most people, though, don’t see that quality in themselves, so the two high school buddies set out to create an experience that would help people recognize it.
They started a company called Safety First Personal Protection Strategies, which stages the eight-hour Courage Quest course. They don’t make enough money from it to quit their Karate teaching jobs, and they would do it for free anyway because both are committed to “making a difference.”
The course simulates violent street attacks. After a brief lecture about what to expect, in about a half-hour Kortenbach and Warnell teach their students all the basic fighting techniques they need. For the rest of the day, the students go through a series of live scenarios of increasing intensity and decreasing information. By the end of the day, the students are left on their own in the final, terrorizing exercise called Courage Quest.
Volunteers wearing specially-designed body armor simulate the attacks and hold nothing back in creating a verbally abusive and physically threatening situation. They play on each student’s worst nightmare and take the supercharged blows from students, whose systems are coursing with adrenalin.
“One of the myths about self-defense is that you need strength and cardio fitness,” Kortenbach says. “But the average street fight lasts about four seconds and when mortal fear floods your system with noradrenalin, you’ll have all the upper body strength you’ll need.”
Kortenbach has seen a petite woman pick up and throw a 200-pound man in the throes of an nor-adrenalin rush. It’s the same surprising capacity that has enabled people to lift cars off people and perform other amazing feats of strength.
After reading the book “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin DeBecker, the pair realized that martial arts training without realism had little value. People with years of training in karate and other techniques often find their skills have little value against an attacker who uses surprise and disobeys all the rules.
By thrusting their students into real-life simulations and purposely scaring them, they create an experience and an opportunity to prevail successfully.
“Fear is your best friend,” Warnell says. It’s not good to feel controlled by fear, but eliminating it removes warning signs that can save your life, they say.
“I like the definition that fear is a ‘feeling in your body that tells you about your environment, so you can make a safe choice’.” Fear heightens your awareness and your intuition kicks in, they say.
This sharpened sensory input gives you little feelings of unease in your belly whenever your normal enviroment appears changed.
Kortenbach says intuition is experience and awareness on a subconscious level, and it determines which type of adrenalin your body will produce for fight (nor-adrenalin) or flight (adrenalin).
“What we give people is an experience of fear that heightens their awareness,” Kortenbach says.
When a person has faced their worst nightmare and overcome it, he says, they feel liberated and have the courage to live their lives with more awareness and less fear.
“The truth is, you can’t depend on law enforcement to protect you,” Kortenbach says. “Safety is a personal responsibility. Period.” He says research with violent criminals shows that attackers look for someone exhibiting the body language of a person they can dominate and control. When you posses the ability to defend yourself, and know through experience that you can, you will never be selected by a predator, he says.
“They way we make the world a safer place is to defeat the predators,” Kortenbach says. “We starve them out. We eliminate family and friends as victims.
“When there are no more victims, there will be no more predators.”