What started as a typical night in the neighborhood turned into a dramatic moment for former two-division UFC champion Henry Cejudo on Friday.
As Cejudo was outside his Phoenix home with his producer, Dylan Rush, he said a vehicle traveling at a speed he estimated to be 80-100 mph plowed into one of his neighbors’ house.
The driver, Cejudo said, tried to flea the scene, and when other passengers tried to follow, Cejudo said he and the home’s owner took steps to detain them, and that he grounded and restrained one of the alleged suspects until police arrived.
“You can see inside this room, if someone was standing in there, they would be dead. All these kids are lucky to be alive,” Cejudo said in a statement shared with MMA Junkie. “Once they got out I told them, ‘Hey, you guys aren’t going nowhere.’ The owner of this house tried to stop them and said you need to be held accountable. One of them ended up (punching) my neighbor, and that’s when I had to step in.
“Pretty much all my neighbours came in to fight the situation. I ended up lifting him, dropping him, slapped him around a little bit and just pretty much controlled him.”
Cejudo said it was “devastating” to see the damage to his friend’s home and said a block party occurred with children earlier in the day on the same street on which the accident took place.
“If it was a couple hours earlier, someone would be seriously injured,” Cejudo said.
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