Please don't let her be dead

Photo: The Canadian Press

With tires screeching and bodies flying, Marcus Martin shoved his fiancee out of the way of a car charging through a crowd of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Marcus Martin was promptly hit and upended by the car as it plowed through the crowd. Flat on his back with a broken leg, he says he experienced several minutes of terror.

"The only thing running through my mind was: please don't let her be dead," Martin, 26, told The Associated Press in an interview. "Please don't let her be dead."

Marissa Blair was OK, and Martin's body was captured in a photograph as he tumbled over the crashing car that fatally hit Heather Heyer, a friend who had been marching with Blair and Martin. Nineteen others were injured.

Martin's mother, Kimberly Martin, was terrified as she watched the scene replayed on television.

"I'm thanking God, because after seeing that photo and then I'm seeing videos and I'm seeing my son behind this car and then when I see the car backing back up the street, it was nobody but God that got him out of the way, you know? And it was just a cruel, cruel, act because those peaceful people: it was like going to a battleground without any protection from anybody," she said.

While her son survived, Kimberly Martin said she's pained by Heyer's death.

"As a mother it hurts, you know, because I could have lost my child, but somebody else did and, like I said, it just hurts," she said.