When Roger Reis walked out of his gym at Yonge and Dundas last Saturday afternoon, he walked into his city being "torn apart."
As he stood outside the Bell Store on Yonge south of College, a man walked through the newly smashed window, grabbed a box with a phone inside, and walked out, which is right when Reis grabbed the man, wrestled him easily to the ground, threw the box back into the store, and yelled "Don't steal!" A few feet away, Corey Surge recorded the whole seventeen-second encounter in a video that's now been watched more than 700,000 times.
"There was no thought behind it," Reis explains about his decision to tackle the looter. Burlington-born and thirty-seven years old, Reis is a Bank of Montreal employee with the appropriate job title of "Six Sigma Black Belt," who also happens to have a real second-degree black belt in Goju karate ("But that was a long time ago," he laughs).
"It's not like a big premeditated thing: there was no storyboard, there was no whiteboard with a grease pencil," he says. "In retrospect, I should have been a little bit more afraid. But to be honest, I didn't think about it...the video itself was seventeen seconds, the thought process behind it was a couple of seconds."
When he tells the story now, Reis sounds like he was concerned more about the looter's safety than his, anyway. "It's a younger guy," he explains. "You don't want to hurt him, obviously."
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