Dimas Pinzon was called a hero this summer after he lept onto the tracks (note: not recommended) in order to save a man who had slipped off the platform at the Virginia Square-GMU Metrorail station as a train was oncoming. ARLnow.com managed to obtain the surveillance video of what happened — and its a wild piece of footage.

This is one amazing piece of video. It shows a man, who is obviously not steady on his feet for whatever reason, slipping violently onto the tracks — people immediately start waving their hands and rushing to get the attention of the operator of the oncoming train. Pinzon leaps into action on the top left side of the video about 38 seconds in. It’s a dramatic few seconds before he leaps, though — you can see Pinzon, in the seconds before he jumps in, hesitating and making a few false starts: you can almost hear him thinking, “do I really want to risk this?” The sight of Pinzon and another man struggling to get the person back up to the platform is a good indication of how deceptively large the space between it and the track bed are. Here’s a second angle of the incident.

Heroics aside, Metro has been making the media rounds to tell people not to do this kind of thing — in retrospect, Pinzon is pretty lucky that he didn’t trip or disturb the covers over the third rail and electrocute himself.