The hero who helped three courageous Americans overpower a gunman aboard a train in northern France on Friday thought the daring deed would be one of the last things he’d ever do.
“My thought was ‘I’m probably going to die anyway. I’d rather die trying to take this person down,'” Chris Norman told reporters Saturday.
The brave British businessman was working on his computer aboard the high-speed passenger train when he said he heard a gunshot and glass breaking.
His first reaction was to hide when he saw a suspect emerge with an automatic rifle. But he sprang into action after he heard U.S. National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos’ scream, “Get ’em!”
Norman, a married father of two children, jumped on the shooter and pinned his right arm down as two U.S. service members and a college student beat him until he was unconscious.
“I’d rather die being active,” he said. “What else is there to do? Either you sit down and you die or you get up and you die.”
Norman said his role in the takedown was minimal compared to Skarlatos and his childhood friends Anthony Sadler, a senior at Sacramento State University, and Spencer Stone, an Air Force member from Sacramento, Calif., who brought down the suspect.
“Were it not for Alek Skarlatos, I would not be standing here today,” Norman said.
The four men, after tying up the potential terrorist, spread out through the train to scour for other attackers and aide passengers who were slashed by the assailant’s knife.
“My mind was purely survival, maybe I have a chance to make it out and I help these blokes,” Norman said. “You see enough of these kinds of attacks to understand they will kill everybody once they get started.”
Norman, who was returning from a business trip in the Netherlands to his home in southern France, said he hasn’t been able to sleep since the horrifying ordeal.
The gravity of the situation has only begun to sink in, he said.
“It’s very difficult to really understand,” said Norman, adding that he began grasping what happened when he “tried to close” his eyes later that night.
“I’m beginning now to realize what we’ve done,” he said.
With Rachelle Blidner