‘Stop the dying’: cop’s thought as she shot mass killer
Miklos Bolza |
A police inspector who ended a mass-stabbing rampage has described the fear she pushed through when confronting the killer and shooting him dead.
Joel Cauchi had been experiencing psychotic symptoms when he armed himself with a 30-centimetre knife and entered the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre on April 13, 2024.
He launched an indiscriminate attack, killing six people and injuring 10 others, in a tragedy being examined at an inquest in Sydney.
Inspector Amy Scott on Tuesday described backing up as Cauchi ran at her with his knife on the shopping mall’s air-bridge.
“What was going through your mind when you fired the first shot?” counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer SC asked.
“That he was going to kill me,” Insp Scott replied.
As the first police officer on the scene, she found crowds of panicked shoppers streaming out of the complex.
“People starting saying to me ‘there’s a guy in there with a knife, they’re stabbing people’,” she told the NSW Coroners Court.
“‘He’s killing people, you’ve got to help us, please get in there.'”
She pursued the 40-year-old without waiting for backup, telling the court she wanted to eliminate the threat as quickly as possible.
“(My thinking was) don’t wait, go, basically, stop the killing, stop the dying.”
Before shooting him twice, Insp Scott made sure all civilians were either behind her or were safely out of range of ricocheting bullets.
It took 85 seconds for her to enter the centre, find Cauchi and shoot him.
Becoming emotional in the witness box, Insp Scott commended the bravery of the other police officers who had also gone into the shopping mall not knowing what lay inside.
“We ask a lot of young police,” she said.
“We as a society think that police don’t feel fear, don’t feel the burdens and pressures of what everyday humans do.
“I can assure you that they do. They were absolutely extraordinary and they saved lives on that day.”
Asked by Sophie Callan SC – representing the NSW police commissioner – if she felt fear when running into the centre, Insp Scott said she did.
“I actually felt nauseous as I ran in because in my head I resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to die,” she said.
Following the police officer’s testimony, two civilians – commonly referred to as the “bollard men” – will give evidence about what they did during the attacks.
Silas Desperaux and Damien Guerot halted the knifeman’s ascent of an escalator and later witnessed the fatal shooting.
The court previously was told Cauchi had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen and had been successfully treated until 2019 when he stopped his medication.
He lived a largely transient life away from the support of his parents in Toowoomba near Brisbane and had been homeless when he stepped foot into the shopping centre for the last time.
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