When Spc. Rene Rodriguez saw a woman being viciously attacked outside a coffee shop near Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, he asked himself what his father would do.
It was the middle of a warm October afternoon. There were plenty of onlookers, but no one was stepping in.
“My heart dropped because I saw someone being violently abused. I saw nobody was helping,” Rodriguez recalled in an interview with Military.com. “I was scared … nervous. But I just stepped outside of my car and let my instincts take action … I was just by myself, there were people who could have come in and helped me, helped the situation. But people decided to look instead.”
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Rodriguez, a medic with the 25th Infantry Division, confronted the man, who, he said, reeked of alcohol. He was kicking and punching a woman in her early 30s. She was screaming for help, thinking she was going to die. He got between the two, shoving the man and swiftly put the woman into his car.
“As I get back in the car with her in it, the man opens the door, pulls her out and starts beating her again. I run out, push him,” he said.
The woman got into Rodriguez's car again; the attacker smashed the passenger window as he started to drive away. Finally, police showed up and detained the assailant. Rodriguez said he and the woman made it out with relatively minimal injuries, some bruises and…
