For some reason, Dean Cooper, 21, decided to change clothes Sunday night between shooting at the gun range and seeing the new Iron Man movie.
He noticed a small crowd on Plainfield Pike, just before the turn to his Cranston home.
"I saw a motorcycle on the ground, then I saw somebody pinned underneath."
Once a volunteer firefighter, the 2009 graduate of Cranston West trained as an emergency medical technician.
He also has military training, although his military career was cut short because of medical reasons, he said.
Knowing what to do "just kind of takes over."
A neighbor, Howard Woolfolk, 39, had moved the cruiser-style Harley off the victim, but the man's leg was still pinned.
Cooper helped free the leg.
The man, whom police did not immediately identify, was covered in blood.
He asked a bystander to get the medical kit he keeps with his shooting gear. He asked someone else to call 911 again so he could give details -- that it was a 40- to 50-year-old male with cuts and a serious laceration to his skull -- directly to the dispatcher.
He put a military blood-clotting powder on some of the wounds. He asked for a towel to augment the gauze. He applied pressure against the most severe bleeding.
Although people told him that what he did was brave, he doesn't think so.