‘Escape, hide, tell’: terror cop’s mass stabbing plea
Miklos Bolza |
As a knife-wielding psychotic killer stalked his way through a busy shopping centre, most people fled.
But some shoppers reached for their smartphones and hit “record”, something a high-ranking anti-terrorism police officer hopes to never see again.
Chief Inspector Colin Green on Thursday said the public did not know how to react to an armed offender in a crowded space.
The slogan “Escape, Hide, Tell” – recommending getting away from the threat or finding a place to hide before calling the police – should be as ingrained as fire safety mottos, he said.
“This should be a message that is as common to our younger generation as ‘Get down low and go, go, go’,” he told the NSW Coroners Court.
The court is examining the circumstances surrounding the Bondi Junction mass stabbing in Sydney that claimed the lives of five women and a male security guard in April 2024.
Their killer, Joel Cauchi, was experiencing psychotic symptoms when he armed himself with a 30cm knife and launched the indiscriminate Saturday afternoon attacks.
Chief Insp Green, a NSW Police Terrorism Protection Unit member, warned against filming unfolding terror events on phones as many people did during the April 13 attacks.
Security footage and a computerised “fly-through” reconstruction were released by the court, revealing the chilling moments before the attacker was shot dead by police.
One of the clips showed French nationals Silas Despreaux and Damien Guerot at the top of an escalator armed with bollards trying to stop Cauchi.
“It’s about saving lives, it’s about preventing injury and death,” Chief Insp Green said.
Chaos felt by shoppers also flowed through to emergency services, with the inquest told the man in charge of the state’s specially trained paramedics was only alerted “by accident”.
The duty officer that day, who cannot be legally named, was in charge of the NSW Ambulance Special Operations Teams containing paramedics experienced in giving medical aid in high-risk situations.
While NSW Ambulance was told within two minutes of the attack that started at 3.32pm, the specialist paramedics manager only found out when he called the control centre about an unrelated matter about 3.46pm.
“I became aware of the incident kind of by accident,” he told the inquest.
He was told that the centre did not have time to deal with his matter as “someone (had) just gone nuts with a gun at Bondi”.
While special operations paramedics had been deployed to the shopping centre at the time, it could have been done more efficiently, he told the court.
Under questioning, he agreed he had been left “troubled” by not being contacted about the serious incident.
Someone could have been sent to pick up ballistic helmets and vests from a central repository and get them to the team on the ground faster, the officer told the court.
Instead, paramedics at the mall had to wait 16 minutes to get clearance from NSW Police to use the personal protective equipment located there, he said.
Rostering shortfalls and heightened risk of beach incidents because of good weather also resulted in no special operations paramedics being embedded with the NSW Police Tactical Operations Unit on the day of the attack.
Cauchi stabbed 16 people within five minutes in the shopping centre before being shot dead by police Inspector Amy Scott.
Dawn Singleton, 25, Faraz Tahir, 30, Ashlee Good, 38, Jade Young, 47, Pikria Darchia, 55, and Yixuan Cheng, 27, were killed.
He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager and was successfully treated until 2019 when he stopped his medication, the inquest was previously told.
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