Only a few hours earlier he had slipped into Vanderbilt’s trauma unit, visiting two women who survived the shooting. He spoke to them softly and stayed perhaps two or three minutes in each room, deflecting any talk of his bravery.

“How you doing, Mom and Dad?” he asked in one room before talking about donating money raised through a GoFundMe page to the injured and the families of the dead.

“Hey girl,” he said in the second. “How you doing?”

Through their quiet tears, it seemed, the patients could only whisper back. As the father of a 4-year-old girl, Mr. Shaw said the morning’s most striking exchange was his tearful embrace with the young woman’s father.

“We had a father moment when we saw each other,” Mr. Shaw said afterward in the lobby, where one woman approached him for a selfie. “If you can imagine, actually, your child being there and meeting the person who saved their child, it was very touching.”