A Northwest College instructor has apologized for mistakenly leaving his firearm in a classroom earlier this month.

Instructor of Criminal Justice Dave Patterson — a longtime law enforcement officer — accepted full responsibility for the Oct. 14 incident in an interview with the Northwest Trail and in an email sent to NWC faculty and staff last week.

“My intent is to regain the trust, because I understand how big of a mistake it was,” Patterson told the Tribune Wednesday evening.

Patterson had left his classroom in the Yellowstone Building around 11 a.m. after finishing with his Introduction to Criminal Justice class. It wasn’t much later — Patterson doesn’t think more than 12 minutes could have passed — when he realized he’d left his backpack behind, with the pistol inside. He called Campus Security Coordinator Lee Blackmore, who said his backpack had just been turned in.

Assistant Professor of Speech Communications Greg Thomas had found the unzipped pack near the classroom’s podium and spotted the gun; Thomas dismissed his class and brought the items to Blackmore’s office.

That evening, Blackmore sent out a campus-wide email saying a gun had been found in a backpack, the owner was quickly identified and that it was “very apparent there was never any harm intended.” NWC officials didn’t say whose gun it was, but released information about the owner that seemed to point to Patterson.

The disturbance the gun ended up causing on campus is somewhat ironic, because Patterson had begun carrying it in response to the Oct. 1 mass shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College.

“My original intent was that, after the Oregon incident, I felt somehow that I should try to be able to mitigate if something bad happened, and I made a mistake in how I dealt with that, and I apologize,” he said.

Patterson, who is authorized to carry a concealed weapon on the Northwest College campus, said the mistake made him feel physically sick.

He’s in his first semester at the college, teaching classes on firearms, criminal investigations and criminal justice. He retired from the Park County Sheriff’s Office in July after seven years as a lieutenant there (he remains a reserve deputy), plus another 24 years of service with other law enforcement agencies.

Patterson said he was disciplined by NWC administrators and he called the punishment appropriate. He had not wanted to speak out while the college’s internal investigation was still pending, but once the discipline was finalized, “I felt the need to give my apology,” Patterson said.