To the people who say ‘enough’

Sometimes, people stand up and say “enough.”

It could have gone very badly for “Matt,” who didn’t want his last name used in his interview with KARE 11, when he thwarted a sexual assault in a downtown Minneapolis parking ramp in the middle of the day.

“I was coming home from work to my car in the parking ramp,” said Matt (no last name used), a good Samaritan). “There was this gentleman lightly jogging towards me and passed me and there was a woman behind him on her phone. As I got closer to the woman, she said ‘Can you please go watch this guy? He just assaulted this girl.’ At that point, I turned around and ran after him.”

Matt said he tackled the suspect after chasing him down stairs from the roof to the ground floor.

“We went to the ground and then he sprinted off into oncoming traffic towards Pizza Luce and dipped into the alleyway there, at which point, which I caught up to him in there, we (he and two other women) saw him and then he split and we lost track of him.”

“If someone else that I loved was in that sort of situation, then I would have wanted to have someone kind of do something similar,” he said. And that’s really the point. He was doing this for a stranger.

At 2 in the afternoon.

Angela Champagne-From knows this scenario. She was assaulted and stabbed in a downtown Minneapolis parking ramp in April 2012. Now she counsels women on protecting themselves, WCCO says.

“When you get to the car, look in the back seat. As you are approaching the car, look under the car,” she said.

Champagne-From says it’s best to avoid a physical confrontation if at all possible. Make a lot of noise, such as yelling the word “fire” – which is more likely to get attention than screaming.

“If they get you in the vehicle and take you from crime scene one to crime scene two, your chance of survival decreases by 85 percent,” Champagne-From said.

She says another tip is to put your phone away when walking to your car. It distracts you from your surroundings.