On Tuesday morning, 53-year-old Andrew Hardy was trying to break up a fight when he was stabbed in the back. Hardy then strolled into a Queens, N.Y., McDonald's with the knife still sticking out of his back. With his white T-shirt soaked in blood and the knife plunged deep into the center of his back, Hardy talked away on his cellphone.
"He was cool and calm. But you could tell he was shaken up," Hardy’s friend, Michel Green, 43, of the Jamaica section of Queens, told the New York Post. "I went to pull the knife out, but someone said, 'No, no! It might have hit an artery!'"
One customer told the Post that it appeared Hardy was on the phone saying his last goodbyes.
"I'm pretty sure he was on the phone talking to somebody in his family or a loved one," witness Tromaine Yancey told WCBS/Channel 2.
"He was talking to them and telling them it might be the last time he's speaking to them, he just wanted them to hear his voice."
Yancey told the news station that diners kept watch until an ambulance arrived to make sure Hardy didn't lose consciousness.
"Everybody was standing there to make sure he didn't fall backwards on the knife," she told the news station.
According to the Post, Hardy was stabbed after trying to break up a group of men whose argument turned to bottle-hurling across Sutphin Boulevard in Queens.
Hardy was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center where he was treated and released the same day.
"I'm blessed to be alive," Hardy told the Post Tuesday evening. "It was just a fight and it escalated into something bigger. They hit me from behind, so I couldn’t see them—but I have an idea who it was."
Authorities believe that the man who stabbed Hardy was wearing a white shirt, but the Post notes that police had made no arrests as of Tuesday.
"They could have killed him," the victim's mother, Alice Hardy, 78, told the Post. "I had just come from a funeral—and when I got the call about him, I thought I'd have to go to another!"
Read more at New York Post and WCBS/Channel 2.