Stories of the people who defined the week

London: Tarek Jahan heard a car accident in Winson Green, Birmingham, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and ran to help. "My instinct was to help the three people," he told reporters. "I didn't know who they were or if they'd been injured. I was helping the first man and someone came up behind me and told me my son was lying behind me. So I started CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] on my own son, my face was covered in blood, my hands were covered in blood."

Haroon, his youngest son, was killed that night, at the age of 21: with him, two brothers, Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31.

"Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home. Please," Jahan ended his statement. Chris Sims, the chief constable of the West Midlands, said the impact of this had been decisive. "Those words were so powerful, so heartfelt and so spontaneous and generous that I think anyone that heard them must have been moved. Certainly, anyone that felt that there was any mileage from continuing a cycle of violence in the name of those young men that died will have thought twice about it." Beyond Birmingham, across the country, the magnitude and understatement of Jahan's sorrow seemed to puncture the aerated atmosphere.

Pauline Pearce

By the time she'd become an "internet sensation", Pearce was known, in the newspaper rubric, as a "grandmother and jazz singer". As she said to a crowd of rioters on Monday night in Hackney, "We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker [retailer]. If we're fighting for a cause, let's fight for a cause. You lot put me off." In the end, though, what she said and even the way she said it was less important than the fact that she said it: the inspirational courage of standing in the middle of a riot, speaking truth to people who are already angry enough to be breaking things.

She says she's embarrassed by the attention, now, which must be pretty common when you're an internet hit for something random, doing a hula dance in your pants, or falling off a sofa. But she's an internet hit because of her sheer mettle.

Monika Konczyk

If it wasn't the worst event, this was the worst image: with distressing resonances of 9/11, nothing quite expresses the savagery of a fire as well as the sight of someone jumping out of a window to get away from it. The firemen waiting below the rented flat in Croydon on Monday night look willing and hardy, but you'd still rather land on a trampoline, or better still, not have to jump out of window. The man who caught her was a passer-by named Adrian, from Romania.

Upinder Randhawal

Sangat TV's — a Sikh community station based in Edgbaston — standout moment, among its compelling news coverage, particularly on Tuesday night, was when Randhawa was filming the police from a car, as they chased rioters. He offered them a lift, and moments later the perpetrators were arrested. For dramatic impact, that was peerless, but the station's stated purpose "to spread peace, defend our faiths and educate people" was, if anything, more acutely expressed in a film Randhawa had made earlier that day, of a group of people as they learnt about the deaths of their three friends.

Ashraf Haziq

The 20-year-old Malaysian student was in the unenviable position of distilling the carelessness of the violence: he was knocked to the ground by a gang of young men, who broke his jaw, stole his bicycle and left him bleeding on Monday night in Barking. But that's not even the worst of it: a passer-by, Abdul Hamid, filmed the moments directly afterwards. Someone appears to help Haziq, who is sitting on the ground. As that man helps him up, another relieves him of items from his rucksack. You can't watch this and think it's a great moment for humanity.