Bartender Bradford Burner didn't stop to think when he heard someone screaming and saw a man race through the Westin Hotel and into the streets of the Gold Coast still crowded from the Festival of Lights.
"The way the person screamed, 'Stop that person!' It was bone-chilling," said Burner, 35, speaking for the first time about a botched robbery and stabbing on the Mag Mile this past weekend. "I just reacted."
As Burner closed in near some shops at the Hancock building, the man turned toward Burner with a knife in his hand.
"Someone yelled something, the gentleman turned around (and) saw me coming towards him," Burner told Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass on WLS-890 AM. "The next thing I know, he was lunging at me with a sharp object."
Burner was cut on the left side of his chest and fell to the ground.
"I was like, 'What the hell just happened?' " Burner told the Tribune after his radio interview.
The fleeing man ran across the street and slowed down, trying to blend in among the families strolling along North Michigan Avenue.
"I looked right over at him. He paused for two seconds and looked directly back at me, and then he proceeded down the steps," Burner said during the radio interview. "His demeanor was that of a person trying to get away. ... Sacrifice everything to get away from the situation."
Burner remembers parents and their small children staring down at him as he lay bleeding. He decided not to wait for an ambulance and hailed a cab. He hopped in and asked, "What was the fastest he could get me to Northwestern Hospital?"
"The taxi driver was freaked out," Burner said. "He was like, 'Are you crazy?' I said, 'I'm really serious about this,' " Burner said, showing the cabbie the bloody side of his shirt and vest.
Burner said he tipped the driver before going inside for stitches, though he can't remember how much it was.
As Burner rode to the hospital, police arrested Jimmy Harris, 56, a parolee with with 60 arrests who had been freed from prison just eight days earlier, authorities said.
Harris had tried to rob an Oak Brook doctor, Mir Jafar Shah, in the restroom of the Westin and stabbed him during a scuffle, then fled out of the hotel, according to police. Shah and his family had been dining after attending the lights festival.
Burner bristled at being called a hero.
"My heart goes out to (Shah) and their whole family that they had to go through this tragedy," Burner said on the radio. "I don't see it as me being a hero. I was just trying to stop an individual that was doing something wrong."
Tribune reporter Jason Meisner contributed.
wlee@tribune.com
Twitter: @MidnoirCowboy
Bartender wounded in hotel stabbing: 'It was bone-chilling'
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Bartender wounded in hotel stabbing: 'It was bone-chilling'
