Armando Lopez was packing up after playing a gig at a nightclub in south Denver on Saturday when his bandmate pointed out a man bleeding in the street outside.

The man’s leg was nearly severed, Lopez said, and he was bleeding at “a pretty lethal rate.”

“I remember saying to my (Brothers of Brass) bandmate, ‘That’s too much blood. That’s a lot of blood,’ ” Lopez said.

Denver police said the hit-and-run crash near South Broadway Street and East lowa Avenue happened about 10:20 p.m. when the driver of a lime green Dodge Ram hit a motorcycle rider, who then slid and hit a pedestrian. Both the motorcyclist and the pedestrian had life-threatening injuries.

Lopez’s next moves were almost automatic, he said. He ran to his truck and grabbed the trauma kit he started carrying after his friend Alicia Cardenas was fatally shot in December 2021 at her shop, Sol Tribe Custom Tattoo and Body Piercing.

He remembered the Stop the Bleed certification he signed up for while processing Cardenas’ death and immediately applied a tourniquet to the motorcycle rider’s leg and tried to comfort him until an ambulance arrived.

“I tried to tell him he was going to survive, he was still alive, he was going to make it to the hospital,” Lopez said.

The man did survive, and Lopez said he hopes his experience inspires others to get Stop the Bleed training so they can help save lives in a crisis.

Lopez was at Sol Tribe on Dec. 27, 2021, shortly before Cardenas and Alyssa Gunn Maldonado were fatally shot by a gunman who also killed three others in a shooting spree across Denver and Lakewood.