She could have ignored the pleading eyes she saw in her rear-view mirror - thousands would have - but she didn't and that's why she is a Neighbourhood Hero.

"There's nothing really special about me and my family," says Brenda Newhart (not her real name). "I'm a professional, my husband's a professional, and between us we have a blended family of four children. Add a one-eyed cat and a black Lab and you'll see that we are pretty darn normal."

"Say what she will," said Jane Templeton, Executive Director of the Haven Society "but Brenda Newhart is definitely a Neighbourhood Hero."

Newhart recalls that March 26, 1998 was a beautiful day. So beautiful she almost stayed home to work in the garden but something told her she would be needed at work. So off she went.

But March 26 turned out to be a normal day at the office, normal but for one thing. She was ten minutes late leaving. As a result, she was 10 minutes behind schedule when she arrived in the middle lane at a familiar intersection.

A few seconds later when she looked in her rear view mirror, she saw a man punch a female passenger in the face, not once but several times. She also saw three small children in the back seat screaming. Blood flew everywhere. When the woman tried to escape, the man grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back. The children screamed even more loudly.

At that point her eyes and the pleading eyes of the bloodied woman locked together. Immediately Newhart jumped out of her truck and headed toward the Van yelling for someone to call 911.

"Doors started to open" Newhart recalls, "and I was soon surrounded by some very big men all wanting to help." Others called the police.

"It's 50/50 you know," said the surrounded driver indicating a cut in the fleshy part of his hand, "she stabbed me first."

So that was the scene for the next several minutes -- Three terrified young children and two adults in a bloodied van surrounded by vehicles whose drivers would not budge until the police and ambulance had arrived.

A few days later Newhart learned that the woman had refused to go to the hospital. Instead she chose to go home with her husband.

"I would like to think I saved that woman from a life filled with physical and mental abuse," Newhart says, "but the fact is I probably didn't.

And I would like to think that the husband felt so bad about his unacceptable behavior that he will never, ever strike her again and that she will never consider stabbing him either. The fact is he just might ... and she might too.

I would also like to think that for the children's sake that event might have broken the cycle of violence in this family. But I certainly don't know that.

So what's the lesson to be learned?

"I have never had to deal with physical violence before," says Newhart "most of us haven't but that day I couldn't look past it, over it, under it or through it. I was forced to see, forced to feel and from deep within me I found the need to act and others felt the same need and acted with me.

That experience taught me that, if we truly see others in need, up close and personal, the vast majority of us will choose to do what's right. People really are pretty darned good."