"Kinzinger had only a split second to decide whether to intervene and risk his own life — a decision that, he admits, didn’t come easily. “They say in a crisis half of the people run, 40% freeze and 10% act. I felt every one of those emotions,” he says. “If someone would have whispered ‘Run’ to me, I would have run.” Ultimately, his conscience wouldn’t let him walk away. “There were two immediate thoughts that went through my head. The first one was, ‘If I act, I’m gonna die.’ The second was, ‘If I watch this lady die, and I do nothing, I can’t live with myself for the rest of my life.’ ”. Kinzinger engaged in a tense struggle with the attacker that he describes as a "close grapple." “I had his knife hand and I remember consciously feeling the knife hand trying to stab me,” he says. “It’s not a matter of pride now, it’s a matter of life to win.” After successfully pinning the man to the ground and waiting for police to arrive, Kinzinger was able to walk away, but it took months for him to process what had occurred. “I [had] blood all over me. The shirt that had all the blood, I could not bring myself to wash it for some reason,” he says. “It stayed in a corner in my room and then it was about two or three months later I started realizing I had some PTSD from it… That moment on that street in Milwaukee utterly changed my life.”