James Shaw Jr. aka The Waffle House Hero made an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and the talk show host had a few surprises up her sleeve for him.
Shaw, 29, was dubbed the Waffle House Hero after disarming a shooter who killed four people and injured four others in a Tennessee waffle house. Shaw suffered minor injuries during the shooting.
On the talk show, DeGeneres presented Shaw a check of $225,000 from a GoFundMe page created in his honor and Shutterfly, and then she brought out another major surprise for the hero. Shaw's idol is Dwyane Wade, and DeGeneres got the NBA star on the show to meet him.
DeGeneres told Shaw that Dwyane "just dropped everything" to be there. She continued, "We told him that you loved him and he was your favorite so he just flew out for you."
"I'm glad I could be here," Wade said. "I look at you, I know you don't want to be called a hero, but I look at you as an American hero. ... I would say obviously how brave you are, but for me, when I sit down with my kids and I sit down with them and talk about role models and who I want them to look up to, I tell them to look up to you."
Wade presented Shaw with a $20,000 check, but before he did so, he asked Shaw "what he wants to see come from all of this." Shaw said, "What I want to see come from all of this is it's a public health problem that we all have. It's a mental health problem that the United States as a whole has. ... I want to bring some kind of awareness to it." He spoke of his four year old daughter and said, "I don't want her to live in this world... I just don't want her to live in that problem, so if I could help that problem, then I think that's what I should do."
