The man who tried to take on a mob hell-bent on smashing windows at The Bay during the Stanley Cup riot has been reunited with the two men who saved him from the crowd's brutal retaliation.
Robert MacKay was caught on video confronting a crowd of rioters outside the downtown department store Wednesday night, in an attempt to prevent them from breaking in and looting merchandise.
"The last thing I remember is just grabbing some people and throwing them off to the side," he told CTV News.
In footage distributed widely online, one of the would-be looters lunges at MacKay with a pole. He grabs it back from his attacker and tries to fight off the mob.
"I just tried to push the crowd back, and that's when I got thrown to the ground," he said.
He was completely at the mercy of the rioters when Dean Seskin and Chris McLelland came to his rescue, pulling him to safety.
"These guys are my heroes," MacKay said. "I've just been watching it over and over and over again on TV and the internet, and I get a little choked up every now and then."
The three men met on Sunday for the first time since the riot and swapped memories of the frenzied night.
Seskin says he was wearing a gas mark he had found earlier that night.
"There must have been 10 people at once just pounding," he said. "Luckily, the crowd didn't turn on me."
McLelland jumped in even though a friend was pleading with him to escape the chaos.
"One person after one person would just join in and they'd start to kick, and some scumbag I could see pull out a full can of bear mace," he said.
"When there's 10 people stepping on somebody on the ground, somebody could really easily get killed."
But Seskin and McLelland are reluctant to call themselves heroes.
"I consider Rob a hero," Seskin said. "He tried his best -- he's the real hero. We were just in the right place at the right time to help out. He's what people want to see Vancouver as."
McLelland joked: "I feel like Robin to Batman."
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Bhinder Sajan
