Cameron Cook is a young man who was recently shopping at his local Target with his mother when a strange man caught his eye. Cameron saw that the man was grabbing himself with a “demonic” look, and he appeared to be fixated on a 12 year-old girl in the store.

“My mom goes, ‘Cam, let’s go! Keep walking.’ I was like, ‘No. Something is going on,” Cameron recalled.

When they got closer to the man, Heather noticed that his breath smelled of alcohol.

Cameron saw the man thrust himself and rub onto the startled girl, and it was then that he decided to do something.

“So I went up to him, I was like, ‘Excuse me sir, do you know her?'” Cameron said. “And then the first thing he said was, ‘I’m not a pervert. I’m not a pervert.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t ask you that, sir.'”

Heather added, “[The man] was big… And Cameron had no fear at all. He just stood firm on the fact that he knew what this man was doing was wrong.”

Cameron told the man to leave the store and he complied, cursing the entire way out. Heather said that she was not surprised by seeing her son take action.

“He’s not afraid to do what’s right,” she said, adding that Cameron has always been a leader.

Cameron has since been honored by what he did by his local city council and by the Boston Celtics.

“I just felt I had to step in and say something,” he said. “You have to stand up for what you know is right. It’s not even about courage; it’s about being a person, a human— anyone can stand up and do something like that.”

Find out more about Cameron’s story in the video below!