A man who nearly died after being stabbed in Hyde Park while trying to stop an attack on a woman is recalling his experience, NBC Chicago’s Vi Nguyen reports.
A man is sharing his story after he said he was stabbed while trying to save a woman from being attacked on Chicago’s South Side.
Allan Watts said he was walking home from the store when he saw two people attacking a woman right in front of his apartment building in Hyde Park.
“My mindset and the way I was raised, like, that could have been my mother, somebody’s grandmother or sister.”
The 47-year-old told NBC Chicago he intervened to try to stop them. It happened back in April near the intersection of 50th Street and East End Avenue.
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“My first instinct was to go help,” he said. “Because there were a couple of people in cars and they were video recording it and I was just like, why are they video recording this?”
He told police he was able to get the two guys off the woman, who ran into the building for help. Watts said that’s when he said another man came up from behind him and stabbed him.
“There was a lot of struggling and shoveling, and then once I kind of got them off her, they’re like, what you doing, what you doing, you don’t know,” he said.
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“The talk was like, what are y'all doing? This is an older lady, what are y'all doing? And that’s when another person reached around. I didn’t know what he did I thought he was just trying to grab or hit me when I turned around to face him, he ran away," Watts told NBC Chicago.
Watts said he was bleeding and started to lose his breath. Not waiting for an ambulance to arrive, he said he drove himself to the hospital
“I woke up in the ICU room and they said I got stabbed,” he said. “A knife pierced my heart and my lung and they had to do open heart surgery to replace my heart.”
Watts said he’s been dealing with heart-related problems ever since being released from the hospital. His mother started a GoFundMe page to help with the growing medical expenses.
“I’m just here trying to put all the pieces back together and just make ends meet now,” he said.
While he hasn’t gotten a chance to reunite with the woman and her husband, who he said was also stabbed in the process, he wonders what would have happened if he didn’t step in.
“I really don’t regret what I did, no,” he said. “Because like I told my mother, if this happened again—I’d probably run and do it again.”
Watts said he's still waiting for medical clearance from his doctors to return to work as an electrical lineman. He said he also applied for the victim crime compensation, but was told it could take months to hear back.
Chicago police said the incident remains under investigation and no one has been arrested.
