Hudsons Heroes: Stag party stops gunman at Saskatoon bar

Josh Neudorf was expecting Tuesday night to be a relatively quiet outing during his Saskatoon stag party ahead of being married on the weekend.

He didn’t expect to be faced with the barrel of a rifle.

He also didn’t expect he would have to do what he did next.

“When he pointed the gun upward, that’s when I kind of went in to grab the barrel and push it to the side,” he said.

Neudorf, his best man Joey Duong and groomsman Jesse Heit are the three men credited with taking down a man who walked into Hudsons Canada Pub and fired two shots from a rifle during the downtown bar’s karaoke night.

The trio were visiting from Prince Albert to celebrate Neudorf’s last days without a wedding ring.

Their night took a turn when Neudorf started making his way out of the bar for a cigarette break after midnight.

On his way out, he saw a man enter with a long coat. Then he heard a gunshot.

“When he let that first shot off, I kind of took a step back and said to him, ‘What are you doing?’ ” he recalled.

As the man raised the gun towards Neudorf, the P.A. journeyman chef made the split-second decision to rush the gunman, pushing him against a wall while kneeing him in the groin.

Duong was still sitting at their table when the scuffle broke out.

“I heard something, a big loud pop,” he said.

As Duong ran to help his friend, he saw the gun pinned against the wall. At that point, there was no time to think.

“All I knew was he’s armed, my friend’s in there, I need to make sure he’s safe,” Duong said.

Both Duong and Heit joined the fray, and the force of the collision forced all four men into the women’s washroom and onto the ground. At some point during the fight, a second shot went off — but none of the men know when it happened.

“We were all on the floor managing the barrel (of the gun),” Neudorf said. “After that, it was just work him down until we could access that gun safely.”

The gun was eventually worked free, at which point Heit took it out of the washroom and handed it to the bartender. The trio kept the gunman pinned until police arrived a few minutes later to take the man into custody.

Neudorf said he never heard the man say a word through the whole ordeal.

Despite the violent altercation, the men came away with only bumps and bruises.

“No holes in us,” Neudorf noted in relief.

The groom-to-be still doesn’t know what possessed him to attack the gunman, but he’s glad he was in the right place at the right time.

“If I was two feet back, I wouldn’t have had that chance,” he said. “We would have all been against the wall.”

Saskatoon police said Wednesday they were still trying to determine a motive for why the man entered Hudsons with a gun, and they’re still determining what charges will be laid.

Waited to tell fiance what happened

With it being a stag party, Neudorf and his friends decided to keep the information they passed on to their spouses to a minimum.

“We just phoned them and said, ‘If you hear anything on the news, don’t worry. We’re OK,’ ” Neudorf said. “And we kind of left it at that.”

That left his fiance thinking that the trio had engaged in another newsworthy activity that could believably happen during a wild stag party.

“She thought we were the ones putting fireworks out of the car. But that was not us!” Neudorf said, laughing.

The 36-year-old said he’s doing all right after the incident, though he’s happy to return to Prince Albert in the near future.

“I’m just glad that I’m coming home to my fiance and making it home to her in one piece,” he said.

As for how the stag party rates for Neudorf compared to others he’s taken part in?

“Probably Hangover Part 2,” he said.