A former reporter for the Associated Press, Alex Dominguez, now owns this coffee shop in Fells Point and as he headed out to buy some ice for the store at a nearby convenience store on Sunday evening, his trip was cut short at the corner of South Bond and Shakespeare streets.
"I felt this guy... I felt someone come up right up from behind me and I felt like hit on the back of the head,” said Dominguez. “At first I thought someone was playing with me. It was a little too much, and I turned around and said, 'What is it?' and then this guy like stabbed at me and I didn't feel anything, and I said, 'What's wrong with you?'"
In the frantic seconds, which followed, Dominguez, who was a high school wrestler back in his home state of New Jersey, shifted into survival mode.
"I pushed him down and that's when I realized he had a knife," said Dominguez. "I pulled the knife out of his hand and I thought, 'Well, I'm not going to kill some mentally ill person,' and at this point, I didn't realize I'd been hit, because... I don't know if it was adrenaline. I didn't feel any pain. So I threw the knife away, and I was holding the guy down and I thought, 'Well, the cops will come get him,' and a bystander came up and said, 'You should let him go. You're going to bleed out. You're going to die. You should let him go. Stop struggling.'"
His attacker then simply walked away, and a few minutes later, paramedics arrived to take Dominguez to the hospital where doctors spent hours stapling and stitching wounds to his back, neck and cheek.
If you think the attack may have soured the victim on the city, which he calls home, you'd better think again.
"I really think that this was just a mentally ill person who should have received help earlier, but I've been here since 1989,” said Dominguez. “This is the safest place. This is as safe as the suburbs. It's just occasionally some nut job... This has been a very safe neighborhood."
Dominguez says one of his neighbors had recently spotted the same man with his hands raised above his head, yelling the word, 'Illuminati', in that same neighborhood.
He adds investigators are checking security camera footage in the area to help identify his attacker.
