UFC welterweight Kevin Holland helped with taking down a gunman who opened fire in a Houston sushi bar on Monday night. Nobody was injured after the gunman was quickly subdued.
According to reports, a panic alarm was triggered at RA Sushi in the Highland Park neighborhood of Houston around 11:30 pm. Houston Police Department Sgt. Ricardo Salas said about 40 to 50 people were inside the restaurant when the suspect fired one shot in the bar area.
After the gunman opened fire, Holland and a friend who also trains martial arts immediately took action. “Next thing you know, you just hear a ‘pop’ and then everybody started getting down,” Holland’s friend Patrick Robinson told Houston’s NBC 2. “Everybody started getting down. Next thing you know, me and my buddy, we ran to the shooter, got him down, strangled him, took the gun from him, and then called the police. Police came and got him.”
The “buddy” Robinson referred to was UFC welterweight Kevin Holland, who declined interviews with local news stations. Holland later uploaded a video of him and Robinson commenting on the incident immediately after it happened.
This was Kevin Holland's reaction shortly after he and a friend took down a gunman Monday night at a restaurant in Houston.
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@Trailblaze2top / @ko_reps) pic.twitter.com/YxN2WdtPXI
— MMA Junkie (@MMAJunkie) March 15, 2022
This wasn’t the first time that Kevin Holland sprang into action in order to stop a criminal. In October, Holland tailed and apprehended a car thief in Saginaw, Texas. The UFC fighter witnessed the theft and called coach Shug Dorsey for backup since he was near the coach’s house. “I could hear the cars turning corners,” Dorsey told MMA Junkie approximately one hour after the incident occurred. “I asked him what streets he was on. He started telling me the streets. We joked that he was like a real cop, with us coordinating while he’s driving.”
Sure enough, Dorsey rolled up to the scene to find Holland holding down the car thief.
UFC fighter Kevin Holland.
Subdues Car Thief
Helps Policehttps://t.co/3MVk6gygGF pic.twitter.com/HrqUFAz3V2
— Damian_209 (@damian_209) October 4, 2021
Kevin Holland recently picked up a win after dropping down to the UFC’s welterweight division. Holland, who has become a fan favorite for his mid-fight trash talk, won fighter of the year in 2020 after going 5-0. The previous year was not as successful, however, as Holland went on a losing streak against some of the middleweight division’s best wrestlers.
Holland then took time off to focus on his grappling game, which appears to have paid off both in the Octagon and the crime-fighting department.
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