Don’t exploit the agony of the families of victims of the Texas flood.

“Put your f***ing hands up.”

You haven’t lived until this has been screamed at you by law-enforcement officers with semiautomatic rifles as you sit in the back of a Nordstrom café on an otherwise nondescript Monday night in New Jersey.

Many years ago, I happened to be in a mall with a gunman. He got fairly close, too, but after an initial encounter at the bottom of an escalator, the rest of the night was all about having no clue what was going on. Just my having been there was reason enough for TV outlets to try to get me to talk about what I had experienced.

Wanting to be . . . useful? . . . I had started tweeting from the scene an hour or so in, probably around the time I realized media was covering the event and was looking for information. My sister, who was with me, had to suffer through my acting like I was “on assignment.” I told colleagues, who were hearing from bookers that I was in a mall in Paramus with an active shooter, that I had no intention of doing any interviews. One producer who contacted me, I think from CNN, told me that I was “the most famous” person (the Paramus candlestick maker was evidently unavailable) on the scene and had a responsibility to the public.

Eventually, after being held around the corner from Nordstrom clothes racks, we were cleared as not dangerous and allowed to leave. In the wee hours, the police found the young man with the rifle dead — he had killed himself, not hurting anyone else along the way. He’d been depressed, apparently, and he wanted his exit to be noticed.

As we drove away, my sister got a call from The Today Show, looking for me. (Years before, I had bought the initial contract for her phone when she was in high school as a Christmas gift — my name was still on the account.) Despite the media’s begging — an understatement, actually; I was half-expecting them to offer to send a helicopter — I did not appear on any television about the incident, which was a huge story for a few hours but long forgotten by the time I woke up the next evening after an afternoon pass-out nap.

Everything I know about that young man, I learned from his friends and family who were on TV that day. Your loved one kills himself, after terrifying people, and brings out what seemed like an army of law enforcement, and you are supposed to talk coherently to a vast audience, in what is probably the first and probably the only time you will ever be before television cameras, about the most violent, heart-wrenching thing to happen to you in your private life? In retrospect, I would have gone on if the bookers promised to leave the family alone.

I bring this up because of the awful flooding in Texas, and the families who lost their precious girls — children at summer camp, having a wholesome good time, when the unthinkable happened — and the media seeking them out. Please: Leave the families alone. The media’s job is to report and unpack the news, not to exploit people in agony.

It’s a perpetual problem with painful news stories. The media need someone to talk. There must be a decent way, a humane way, to go about this.

Pray for these Texas families.