The thing about becoming a reluctant hero is you get no warning you’re going to be asked to play that role. There’s no time to figure out what you should do, or what you want to do — suddenly, you’re confronted with a situation. “You react. Right away. You don’t have any time to do any sort of analysis,” says Peter Hamilton, who found himself thrust into the role this week. We should all hope that if our turn comes, we react as quickly and admirably as he did.

On Easter Sunday, Hamilton woke up early, as usual, in the Leslieville house where he’s lived for 15 years, and had a light breakfast. He and his wife watched as his 12-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter hunted for Easter eggs. There was freshly fallen snow outside, the kind of Toronto spring holiday morning suited to staying indoors. But the Hamilton’s 4-month-old yellow Labrador needed a walk.

“Without having that dog, I wouldn’t have taken a walk through the neighbourhood,” Hamilton says. And if he hadn’t taken a walk, he wouldn’t have encountered a shocking crime in progress, and wouldn’t have had the opportunity to intervene and possibly save a woman’s life. “Whatever fate or destiny comes into it, the dog has as much of a part.”

It was about 9:30 in the morning. Leslieville Public School is down the street from Hamilton’s house. A line of evergreen trees stands on a strip of grass between the schoolyard fence and the sidewalk, a convenient place for canine business. “My dog had taken a poop and I was going to empty the poop bag over at the garbage can at the school,” he says. It was then that he heard a woman’s voice coming from across the street.

“She said ‘Help! Can you help me?’”

The voice came from a small two-and-a-half storey house with red faded brick directly across from the school, a property known in the neighbourhood to be a rooming house. “She was on the porch, I couldn’t really see.” He walked past the red metal fence, whose peeling paint reveals traces of blue and yellow paint underneath, past the rose bush in the rubber tire amid the brown maple leaves covering the lawn. The front porch had a smashed lamp and a torn green carpet.

“I said, ‘How can I help?’ And that’s when I saw her.”

This description of the alleged crime and what follows come from Hamilton’s account, and none of it has been proven in court.

The woman was lying on the porch floor, her hands and feet bound by cloth restraints, duct tape, and handcuffs. Her pants and underpants were pulled down around her ankles, tangled up in her leg restraints. She was shaking quite a bit, and had bruises on her arms and legs.

“She said, ‘Help me, I’ve been kidnapped and held hostage for five days.” She told him that her captor was still in the house — she had managed to wriggle down the stairs while he slept — and that he had a gun and a knife.

By his own reckoning, Hamilton is not a big guy, and as a tech manager for a media company, he has no special training in rescue situations. But he says his work dealing with software crises may have oddly prepared him to react to the emergency situation in front of him. “I knew there was an element of danger. A lot goes through your mind at this time. But I just felt that I could not leave this woman alone.”

He usually carries a phone with him, but had left it at home where it had been charging overnight, so he could not easily call police. He quickly decided he could not carry the woman effectively in the state she was in. So he began trying to free her from her restraints, using the only tool in his pocket, a nail clipper, to snip away at the duct tape on her hands to get it to tear.

He and the woman did not talk much. She kept thanking him, and apologizing to him that he had to help her, Hamilton says, “That was a hard thing to listen to.” He tried to reassure her, “You don’t have to be sorry. It’s okay,” as he worked on her restraints.

That’s when her captor emerged from the doorway.

Hamilton tried to adopt a tall stance, preparing for a possibly violent confrontation. But the man leapt over the woman, and ran past, off the porch across the lawn and into the schoolyard across the street. “He turned around, I did get a look at his face. But he just ran.”

Later on Sunday, police would arrest Rejean Perron, and charge him with repeatedly sexually assaulting the woman (whose name is protected by a publication ban), forcibly confining her in his home between March 31 and April 5, and threatening her with “a black and silver pistol, a black firearm, large knife, and bondage materials.” Police say the accused picked up the 27-year-old woman, a sex worker, near Sherbourne and Shuter Sts., and she agreed to go to his home for a “business transaction.” When she tried to leave, he allegedly threatened her, bound her, and held her captive.

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At the time, Hamilton didn’t know any of that. “The horror of what happened to her, of what she had gone through, hadn’t really sunk into me yet. What sinks into you is the horror you’re seeing right now, which is that there’s a naked woman on the floor in handcuffs who needs help.”

Hamilton tried to comfort the woman, saying “You’re safe,” as he continued to free her arms. He worked for about five minutes, ripping through duct tape, untying the double knots of the cloth binding, breaking open the cheap metal handcuffs. She had a cigarette in her hand, and he helped her to light it. “She really needed a cigarette. That was probably the biggest comfort I could provide her, was to let her have a smoke.”

Three neighbours came walking by, and Hamilton asked them to call 911 as he continued working with his nail clippers to free the woman’s legs. A few minutes later, when she had her legs free and her pants pulled up, police arrived.

He hasn’t seen the woman since. “I should have asked her name,” he says. After talking to police, he returned to his home, and resumed the ordinary day he’d planned with his wife and kids and their dog. “We went for a hike, outside of town. That was good. It calmed everybody down.”

He’s not entirely comfortable being characterized as a hero for his role in this. “I feel a little bit humbled that I’m in the limelight for something so tragic. I wish I could have done more. I wish I could have done more to prevent it. She suffered greatly for five days,” Hamilton says. “I honestly don’t think that what I did was anything more than anybody else would do in that situation. I think most people would. There are a lot of good people out there.”