Johnny Wactor, the late General Hospital star who lost his life to defending his friend and co-worker, Anita Joy, from gunfire during a robbery, his final moments before death has been revealed by the latter.

The terrible event occurred early on Saturday, May 25, following Joy and Wactor’s Friday night shift at the downtown Los Angeles club. The two chose to head out to their cars together, as is usual for the group, along with two other workers.

“It’s mostly men on our bar staff. There’s me and a couple of other ladies that are bartenders, but mostly guys, big strong guys,” Joy told Entertainment Tonight in an interview.

“We’re all very adamant of nobody walks out alone. We’re veteran bartenders, we’ve been doing this for a long time, we know the risks… We always, always took care of each other that way.”

She said that she and Wactor split from the other co-workers at the corner due to different parking spots.

“As we’re walking up, everything is dark. There’s not really a lot of lighting there. There are big trees and stuff covering everything,” Joy explained.

“We’re just shooting the s**t, talking and having fun. As we walk up to the back of my car, I’m like, ‘OK this is me.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m right in front of you.’ We parked at different times, so it was very random that he was directly in front of me.”

Joy then details seeing three men, realising along with Wactor that something was not right. At that time, Wactor put his hand in front of her to hint that she should stay back.

“He’s a protector,” Joy said of her friend of eight years. “He genuinely just cared about me. He would’ve done that with anyone, [even] if he didn’t know them.”

She remembered first misunderstanding the situation as their car being towed.

“He walked down onto the street between the two cars, and as we see over his car, there’s a man down there and he has a big jack and all the sudden, we were like, ‘Oh, this is not [getting] towed,'” she recalled.

“Johnny was directly in front of me and he’s like, ‘Man, this is my car. What are you doing?’ I think we startled him as much as they startled us. They kind of scrambled. I was right behind Johnny to the left a little bit and he had both hands up.”

“He stepped forward — not confronting the guy, not having fists, he had his hands up to his sides, open palms — and he’s like, ‘Hey, man,'” Joy added.

“I was like looking down for a second and I hear a crack and the guy just shot him. They all jumped into the car and they took off. It was just instantaneous… The guy easily could of just jumped back into the car and sped off or shoved Johnny or something, but they just shot him close contact.”

That’s when she says Wactor fell backwards onto her, “tumbling with his whole bodyweight.”

“He turns me around and we both go toppling towards the ground. As I turn and grab him, I was like, ‘Honey, are you OK?’ ‘Cause I didn’t hear a fight. I don’t think there were any words exchanged from their side. He went, ‘Nope, shot,'” she reminisced.

“There’s no time to think during this, but I wasn’t feeling like, ‘Oh my God, my friend is dying.’ This was like, ‘OK, he got shot, what’s next?’ I was thinking [he was shot in] maybe a leg or arm.”

But she later “noticed the blood” when she unbuttoned his vest and shirt.

“I am holding him and screaming my head off for help, because there’s no one else around, the streets are bare,” she said.

“Then a security from my work was crossing the street at the same time to come to his car and he came running over immediately calling 911. I had a long denim jacket, so we took that off and we wrapped it around him and tied it around the wound to try to stop the bleeding and then [the security guard] tried CPR on him.”

Joy said that Wactor “was just very limp” throughout the whole situation after saying his last words: “Nope, shot.”

“He was just kind of flickering in and out of consciousness, but he kept making big gasps,” she said.

“I was screaming at him, like, ‘Johnny, stay with me! Johnny, stay with me!’… He was just kind of gurgling… I was screaming at him to stay with me and that I love him and just begging him [to stay with me]. Those were my final words to him.”