(Tribune News Service) — Marine veterans Matthew Kolakowski and Derrick Perry helped stop a mass stabbing that injured 11 people at a Walmart in Traverse City, Mich., on Saturday.

Perry, Kolakowski and his brother-in-law Chris O’Brien who was also there that day spoke about the event at a press conference in Grand Rapids on Tuesday.

Kolakowski, 39, who is disabled and served in Iraq, had just left the Walmart checkout lane when a worker screamed that a man had a knife.

Then, he heard a “mass wave of just blood-curdling screams from the back of the store.”

He saw the man stab another shopper then stab an elderly woman in the back. He told his daughter and her friend to stay put while he and O’Brien gave chase.

The elderly woman “went down and there was blood pouring out of her. He had taken his knife from his left hand and shuffled it back to his right hand and turned around like he was going to get her again. And he had locked eyes with me at the time, and he saw me with the cart,” he said.

Kolakowski drilled the man — identified by police as Bradford James Gille, 42 — with the shopping cart. Gille tried to get up but another man with a shopping cart struck him from the other side.

Kolakowski had raised his cart to “just smash it on top of him,” when Perry, armed with a pistol, held the accused stabber at gunpoint.

“I ultimately wanted him to put the knife down and back away until law enforcement got there,” Perry said. “I did not see myself as any type of judge, jury or executioner — I just wanted everyone to be safe.”

Perry repeatedly ordered the man to drop the folding knife. Kolakowski, too, demanded that the man drop the knife. Gille finally dropped the knife and Kolakowski grabbed it.

“...I think our show of force is what caused him to put that knife down,” Kolakowski said.

Perry put his legally owned gun away seconds before a Grand Traverse County sheriff’s deputy handcuffed Gille, who was being held down. Kolakowski then helped another deputy who applied a tourniquet to a man’s shoulder.

Two others, including the man with a shopping cart, helped control the stabbing suspect but were unable to be identified.

Gille, with a history of mental illness, is charged with 11 counts of attempted murder and a single terrorism charge. He is held on $100,000 bond. Police said he randomly attacked victims inside and outside of the store.

“They all three did a phenomenal job and they should be looked up [to]... as heroes,” said Ed, Kolakowski’s father and retired Kent County sheriff’s detective who now works as a private investigator. “That could have been much worse if these guys weren’t there.”

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