A gas station clerk in Norwood, Massachusetts used his years of martial arts training to subdue a would-be robber. Surveillance video captured the moment the robber, identified as 46-year-old John Benedict burst through the door and tried to grab cash from the register. Ebrahim Gawargi, who is just 5'2" and weighs only 120 pounds, grabbed Benedict's hand and tried to push him away. The two struggled back and forth until Gawargi grabbed Benedict's sweatshirt.
He managed to pull the sweatshirt off before jumping over the counter. The two brawled for nearly five minutes before Gawargi could get the upper hand. Once he had Benedict on the ground he landed multiple solid punches before putting him in a sleeper hold.
“I just tried to do what I had to do,” Gawargi told Fox 25. “He grabbed my hand, I had over six hundred dollars in my hand.”
A customer outside of the store called the police and when they arrived, Gawargi still had Benedict locked in the sleeper hold.
"I didn't want to kill him, I needed to let him breathe, [but] when he kept moving I gave it more pressure to let him sleep again."
Gawargi trains at least four days a week at a local martial arts academy and the owner John Connors said Gawargi is "a very very scrappy guy."
"He's an excellent student, he's very respectful, he takes his training very seriously," said Connors. "He’s a very determined guy, a very very scrappy guy, so I'm not surprised he got the best of the guy."