Apparently it wasn't enough for Phoenix Jones to get his first win for World Series of Fighting. He had to stop a violent crime in the streets, too.
About a day after Jones—real name Ben Fodor—submitted Roberto Young at WSOF 23 to run his professional record to 6-1, the self-styled real-life super hero noticed a man being pistol-whipped early Sunday morning in his native Seattle and intervened to stop a brutal assault.
Just stopped a murder on Capitol Hill @KIRO7Seattle @KING5Seattle @jasonrantz plain clothes patrol
— Phoenix Jones (@ThePhoenixJones) September 20, 2015
According to video footage provided in a report from John Morgan of MMA Junkie, Jones told Seattle police officers he saw a man hitting another man in the head outside a music venue. When he realized the attacker was holding a pistol, he chose to intervene:
In the middle of the fight, I saw a man start striking overhand to another man’s face. At that point, I got closer and saw that he had a gun in his hand. He was pistol-whipping a person. The man fell down and tried to get up, and two other people started stomping his face...He gets up, and the guy comes back with the gun. At that point, I came through, and I hit the suspect with the gun, and he went down, and the gun came out. I took off. My friend Nate took off with me.
In the ensuing chaos, Jones pursued one of the men he thought was among the group of assailants, and later identified him to police. He subsequently identified other men he thought were assailants to the police as well.
All in all, a fairly eventful weekend, even for a guy like Jones, who's probably pretty accustomed to action-packed weekends.
"I’ve dealt with guns so many times, and I’ve dealt with so many weird scenarios like this that I’m not really in as much danger as people would assume," he said in the video. "I was willing to gamble on that.”
Jones first came to national prominence in 2011, when his vigilante-style crime-fighting ways began to be widely documented in his native Seattle. Fodor, who when in his full Phoenix Jones persona often wears a mask and costume while patrolling the streets, lost his WSOF debut in April, a decision loss to Emmanuel Walo.
