Naperville woman rescues Austin stabbing victim

When a Naperville woman visiting the University of Texas on Monday saw groups fleeing an armed man on campus, her first instinct was to protect her daughter. Her second instinct was to head directly toward the attack.

Single mother and Naperville chiropractor Leona Di Amore has military emergency training and years of medical experience, but it was a mother's intuition that led her to a wounded student in an abandoned campus parking lot, she said.

"I turned around and I looked at my daughter, and I said, 'Alexis, stay inside the building. People are being stabbed.'"

On Monday, a 21-year-old University of Texas student with a large hunting knife stabbed at least four people on campus, The Associated Press reported. The attacker killed one person and seriously wounded others before surrendering to police, authorities said.

Moments before the attack, Di Amore and her daughter, University of Texas freshman Alexis Fischer, were preparing to part ways after a weekend visit.

The two had just finished lunch and were passing through a line of food trucks when waves of people rushed out of the area, Di Amore said.

"My intuition said, 'Something's not right, I don't know what this is,'" she said. "I saw more people running by, so I ran down the hall and I ran out the door, and there were about 100 kids running and sprinting as fast as they could down the corridor. They said, 'Someone's been stabbed! They're stabbing people!'"

University police Chief David Carter described the weapon as a "Bowie-style" hunting knife, according to an Associated Press report. The stabbings occurred within a one-block area as the attacker "calmly walked around the plaza."

Di Amore previously served five years as a medic for a U.S. Navy special operations unit and has 18 years of medical experience under her belt, including running a holistic wellness center, The Healing Place, in Naperville.

With her daughter out of harm's way, Di Amore headed toward whatever had prompted the widespread panic she had just witnessed.

"Everybody had run into the corridor, and there was a kid at the end of the parking lot," Di Amore said. "This kid said, 'I've been stabbed.'"

With a 10- to 12-inch cut on the back of his neck, the young man seemed to be suffering what Di Amore said were life-threatening injuries. The chiropractor dragged the man to a nearby wall and put her medical training to work, applying pressure to his wounds for about 20 minutes until paramedics arrived, she said.

"At one point he asked me, 'Am I going to die?' and I told him, 'No, you are not, I've got you. You are protected. You are safe,'" she said.

Two hours later, Fischer was safe inside the walls of a Texas hotel for the night, and Di Amore was on a flight back to the Chicago area to care for her other child.

Good news came Wednesday when the mother of two returned a missed call from the man she helped rescue and learned he was no longer in the hospital. Rather, he was recovering well at home with his family.

"I knew that your mom was going to be getting a phone call," she told the man. "And I did this for your mom because I'm a mom."

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