Train hero stabbed while protecting woman in Sacramento, Calif.: Witness

Train hero stabbed while protecting woman in Sacramento, Calif.: Witness

The American hero who helped thwart a terrorist attack in France this summer appeared to be breaking up a fight when he was stabbed Thursday morning, according to a witness.

As U.S. Airman Spencer Stone recovers, witnesses are shedding new light on the street fight outside the Badlands club in Sacramento, Calif.

Eric Cain, who was working the night shift at a nearby liquor store, told local CBS affiliate KOVR-TV that the altercation that led to Stone’s being stabbed seemed to start as he attempted to break up a fight between a man and a woman.

Cain reported seeing a group of people walking in the street coming from the direction of a nightclub in the neighborhood.

“Obviously they had left the club together,” Cain told the station. “They knew each other or something. They had been hanging out before this happened.”

It appeared to Cain that a young woman was arguing with her boyfriend and hitting him with a plastic bag. From a nearby street corner, he saw some pushing but did not expect it to boil over into a full-out fight, so he started walking back to his store.

That’s when the man punched his presumed girlfriend in the face and Stone intervened, Cain said. Stone was outnumbered, he said, and surveillance footage from the scene seems to corroborate that description.

“He didn’t look hurt at the time. He was walking with his arms up — you know how you are after you get in a fight,” Cain told the station. “I saw the back of his shirt. I saw a big red mark on the back of his shirt, and another random person walked by, and I just kinda went, ‘I think the dude got stabbed.’”

Cain said he was shocked to see the woman leave in a car with the suspects rather than with Stone.

The airman was hospitalized at U.C. Davis Medical Center and is reportedly expected to make a full recovery.

Sacramento Deputy Police Chief Ken Bernard assured reporters during a news conference Thursday that the incident was not related to terrorism and that police do not think the suspects were aware of Stone’s identity at the time.

In August, Stone received widespread acclaim as one of three Americans who helped to subdue a gunman aboard a high-speed Thalys train in France.

For the valiant act, French President François Hollande awarded Stone, fellow off-duty serviceman Alek Skarlatos, their childhood friend Anthony Sadler and British IT consultant Chris Norman France’s highest honor, “la Légion d’honneur.”

The U.S. Armed Forces decorated Stone with the Airman’s Medal and the Purple Heart for performing a heroic act while not in the field of combat and being wounded in an attack by a foreign terrorist, respectively.