You Can Fight Without Hurting Somebody: When Grapplers Step In

Earlier this year, on Frontier flight 3345 from San Juan to Chicago, a passenger tried to open the rear exit door in mid-air. He tried to get into the cockpit next. Then he attacked an off-duty flight attendant and tried to choke him.

Another passenger stopped all of it. John Longood, a jiu-jitsu instructor from Mansfield, Ohio, pushed the man down into his row, slipped plastic restraints on his wrists, and held him there until the plane made an emergency landing in Miami. The attacker, Juan Reyes, 51, was charged with one misdemeanor count of battery and may face FAA fines over $40,000, News 5 Cleveland reported .

“I’ve prepared essentially my entire life for something like this,” Longood said afterward.

Stories like this get retold in every BJJ gym in America, and most of them grow in the telling. The four below held up: names, dates, charges, coverage you can check. They span six years, from 2020 to 2026, so this is not a wave of incidents. It’s a pattern in what trained people do when violence reaches them: they take control of the situation, and nobody gets hurt. Not even the person causing it.

The news report on the flight is below.

A black belt, a 7-Eleven, and six slushies

On June 16, 2022, Idriz Redzovic was in a Chicago 7-Eleven buying slushies for his six children. A man named Christopher Cruz, 30, took food off a shelf and walked out. Then he came back in and punched the 19-year-old store clerk.

Redzovic owns Supreme Academy of Jiu-Jitsu in Lincoln Park. He’s a third-degree black belt with more than 22 years on the mat.

He took Cruz down and held him until police arrived, and Fox News named the actual positions : “gift wrap” and “twisting arm control,” plus a secure headlock. Cruz was charged with two misdemeanors, battery and retail theft under $300. Nobody was injured. Not the clerk after that first punch, not Redzovic, not even Cruz.

Redzovic explained why nobody got hurt: “the whole position he pinned him in is controlled.” Then he said the thing most martial arts can’t honestly say: “you can fight without hurting somebody.”

That sentence is the whole article. Striking answers violence with damage. Control answers it with time: you hold a person where he can’t hurt anyone, and you wait for the people whose job this is. It’s the same reason police departments have been adding jiu-jitsu to their training : an officer who can control someone rarely has to hurt them.

The CBS Chicago report is below.

The nurse who got attacked at work

In October 2024, at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital in Australia, a man was escorted out of the emergency department after becoming disruptive. He attacked nurse Daniel Nelson as Nelson came out through the sliding doors. Security cameras caught it.

Nelson is an Australian Army veteran with more than a decade of Brazilian jiu-jitsu training. The footage, which spread widely after its release in 2026 , shows him flip the man onto his back, pin him to the floor, and restrain him until security arrived. No punches were thrown. A court later charged and fined the attacker.

Nelson didn’t frame it as a highlight. He framed it as a problem with his job: “Violence against healthcare workers isn’t ‘just part of the job,’ it’s unacceptable.”

The fight came to him, at his job, through a set of sliding doors. Nurses, ER techs, teachers, security staff, social workers: some jobs carry hands-on risk whether you want it or not. For those people, control skills sit closer to safety equipment than to sport.

The news.com.au report is below.

The champion and the BB gun

In October 2020, Josh Henges was walking home in Kansas City in the evening. A man grabbed him from behind, demanded his belongings, and indicated he had a weapon. Henges is a USA Judo national champion. He used his judo and put the man on the ground.

Police arrested the suspect and charged him with attempted robbery. Henges wasn’t hurt.

The weapon turned out to be a BB gun. Nobody knew that during the robbery. Henges made his decision believing a real gun was in play.

He was justified. He was also lucky. Both of those are true at once, and training can’t separate them for you. A real gun, or a different angle, and the same reasonable decision could have ended another way. That’s what these moments actually are: a choice you make without knowing what you’re facing.

The NewsNation report is below.

What grappling honestly can’t fix

Grappling is a poor first answer to more than one attacker. Going to the ground with one person while a second stands over you is widely seen as reckless, and we agree. It’s a poor first answer to a weapon: Henges won that gamble, and it was still a gamble. And concrete is not a mat. The differences between sport BJJ and self-defense BJJ are real, but this ceiling applies to both. Grappling covers a narrow set of problems: mostly one unarmed person at close range.

You also can’t always tell what you’re looking at. In 2017, two men on a Connecticut bridge asked a stranger arguing with his girlfriend if she was okay, and he threw one of them into the river . In 2026, plainclothes officers making a lawful arrest looked so much like an assault that bystanders nearly jumped in. Your eyes give you a guess, not a fact.

And no research shows that training makes a person more likely, or less likely, to step in at all. The mat builds skill, not a duty. The best decisions in every story above were made before anyone touched anyone: reading the scene, keeping distance, choosing to act or to witness.

What the training is actually for

Look at how all four cases ended: the dangerous person held still, in a seat or on a floor, until the people whose job it is arrived. Nobody got knocked out. Control bought time, and time did the rest.

That’s what grappling training builds, and it works in both directions. If violence ever reaches you the way it reached Nelson at work, or Henges from behind, you have options besides panic and damage.

The calm is trainable too. Regular sparring changes how your body responds to threat , because being grabbed by a resisting person stops being novel. The first time someone grabs you shouldn’t be the first time anyone has ever grabbed you.

At Journey BJJ in Madison, self-defense isn’t a separate seminar. We teach it inside our regular Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes, gi and no-gi, to regular adults with day jobs. If you’re reading this at 35 or 45 and wondering whether that window has closed, it hasn’t .

And if you’d rather size the place up before committing to anything, come meet the coach: tour the facility, ask about the programs, no pressure and no obligation. It’s free.

Before you ever need it

Decide your defaults now

The middle of a fight is the worst time to form a policy. Decide now what you would act on, and what you would witness instead: distance, phone out, 911, a clear description. Often the most useful person at a violent scene is the calm one giving police a clear statement.

If you want the physical option, build it before you need it

Any good grappling school can start you. If walking in cold is the barrier, here’s what a first class actually looks like .

Redzovic’s sentence is the one to keep: “you can fight without hurting somebody.” The mat can make that sentence true of your body. Forethought makes it true of your judgment, and that half you can start building tonight.