‘I thought he was going to kill me.’ This is what was racing through the mind of John Hayes, who was stabbed while attempting to stop the killer in Southport.
The 63-year-old, who runs a business next door to the studio where children were attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, has spoken out about the attack, in which three girls were stabbed to death.
He was stabbed in the leg, with the blade just about missing an artery, and was in a critical condition in hospital.
After being discharged on Thursday, John told ITV News of how he ran to help the children when he realised people were injured.
He said: ‘I heard lots of children running out the buildings, screaming, shouting.
‘And that itself isn’t unusual because kids are very excitable normally when they come out of these classes, so that alone didn’t surprise me or strike me as unusual.
‘But that didn’t then die down, which it normally does, and some of my colleagues got up to look out the window.
‘And it was only at that stage when one of them witnessed a young girl on the floor, I assume, by the front door of entrance to our building.
‘And said words to the effect, “There’s a girl outside bleeding out”. And as soon as I heard that I ran, I basically ran the full length of our office to go find out if I could help and what was happening to her and I never got as far as her because she was outside.
‘So still on the first floor, when I opened our office door, I was confronted by another girl on the floor who looked like she had multiple stab wounds and was heavily blood-soaked and a guy in front of me with a knife, who then came towards me in a pretty menacing way. And I thought he’s going to kill me too.
‘I didn’t rationalise, or you don’t have time to do a risk assessment, I just put my arm up when this knife was coming towards me.
‘And I didn’t even realise I’d been stabbed initially, until I looked down and saw blood coming out my leg and I tried to kick him with my right leg and then that’s when I fell over.’
John said he was taken on a stretcher to a road which had become a ‘makeshift holding area’ and was in ‘quite a lot of pain’.
Axel Rudakubana, 17, was named as the suspect in the stabbings, in which eight other children and two adults were seriously injured on Monday.
Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were all killed in the attack.
John is still trying to come to terms with what happened, and has been suffering flashbacks of the attack.
He added: ‘I’m glad that personally I didn’t have to witness all the anguish, those parents arriving on to that scene, it must have been horrific for them.
‘I don’t know how they’ll come to terms with that, particularly the three parents have lost children, but others have had a lucky escape including me.’
Asked if he felt he was a hero, the businessman replied: ‘I’m not going sit here and tell you that I was brave about the whole thing and confronting a knifeman, that’s not the story at all.
‘And as I’ve said to everybody that’s asked, I don’t want this to be about me. I want this to be about the families of those three little girls. I’m really, really saddened to hear what’s happened and it’s going to take me a while to come to terms with that, it really is.’
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