Pro-Wrestler Subdues Violent Train Passenger With a Chokehold When Police Fail to Show Up

Ex-WWE star Shawn Daivari seems to have saved the day Thursday when he put a passenger making violent threats against the rest of the train in a chokehold, he says.

Daivari, also known as Sheik Abdul Bashir, was on a train to the Minneapolis airport when he heard the man "saying racial and anti-Semitic stuff," but didn't take action until the man began making physical threats and it became clear the situation was only escalating.

Daivari told WWE.com what happened in his own words:

There was one older guy sitting in a chair and he told the guy, "Hey, sit down, you’re making the train ride really uncomfortable for everybody." At that point, the guy just got right in front of the older guy and physically threatened him, even threatened to kill him. That’s when everybody started running for the emergency call buttons. They were all hitting the buttons, and we went another stop after that, which was another two minutes. When the doors opened, nobody got on the train, so we knew there were no cops waiting to get on and help.

I didn’t know if this guy had a knife in his pocket or a gun in his backpack, so I just went up to him, turned him around, grabbed him in a rear naked choke/sleeper hold and held until I felt his body go limp. I dropped him, locked on a body scissors and held him down until the next stop, which was about 45 seconds down the road. Then I just grabbed him by the seat of his pants and his collar and I threw him off the train. And mind you, from when this started, we probably went half the length of the trip, which was about 20 minutes. It was one thing when he was saying all that racial stuff, but when he started threatening passengers, I didn’t know if it was just a big guy talking tough like he’s at a bar or if he’s got a weapon. By the time I got to the airport, there were still no cops at the train station. [Emphasis added]

According to one witness, the passenger was so freaked out by his hulking adversary that he peed his pants.

Metro Transit Rail told TMZ that "Metro Transit police responded after being alerted by the train operator to a fight on board" and that "the investigation is ongoing."

Though Daivari left WWE in 2007, according to ProWrestling.net, he's proven for many that "he's still got it."  TV Plus magazine wrote in a tweet: "Think WWE is fake? Wrestler @ShawnDaivari put an unruly train passenger in a choke hold when he threatened to kill people on the train!"

Cover photo via Wikimedia Commons.