A bystander who tried to save Canada gun attack victim Cpl. Nathan Cirillo told the dying soldier that he was a “brave man, he was a good man, and he was loved.” Lawyer Barbara Winters was one of the first on the scene after Cirillo was shot while guarding the National War Memorial in the Canadian capital Wednesday. “I told him, ‘Just think of what you were doing when this happened, you were standing at the cenotaph you were honoring others, just think of how proud that would make your family’,” she she said in an emotional interview with CBC Radio.

Winters, who spent 17 years in the naval reserve, was at the memorial taking photographs moments earlier. She ran back after hearing gunfire, she told CBC, and found a nurse and two military personnel fighting to save Cirillo’s life. “I told him he was loved and that he was a brave man and that he was a good man,” she said, adding: “I hope that’s some comfort to his parents that he didn’t just bleed alone on a sidewalk.”