Parents collecting children saw ‘true horror’, Southport Inquiry told

Parents who witnessed “true horror” when they arrived to collect their children from a dance class have spoken at the public inquiry into the Southport attack.

The families of surviving children gave impact evidence to the hearings at Liverpool Town Hall on Monday, along with a businessman who confronted Axel Rudakubana during the attack on the Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29 last year.

The hearings will examine Rudakubana’s dealings with relevant agencies before he killed Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and attempted to murder 10 others.

In the first of the impact evidence heard on Monday, a mother whose two daughters attended the class said her husband called her when he returned to collect them.

She said: “The words he spoke will never leave me: ‘You need to get here now. The kids have been stabbed.’

“Shock took over instantly. I couldn’t make sense of the words. I went to my neighbour to drive me to the scene, it was the slowest journey to get there.

“My husband meanwhile had entered the building, witnessing true horror that will stay with him forever, and been unable to locate our daughters.

“During his search he recalls time standing still, hearing screams, and he then received a call from our eldest and located the girls at the neighbour’s house.

“He relives these moments daily.”

The woman, whose daughters cannot be named and were referred to as child C6 and child T, said she arrived “to a scene reserved for nightmares”.

She added: “It felt as though I was watching from outside of my own body, like someone was living my life, within a film.

“Emergency services were everywhere, children lay hurt around me, I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to know.”

Their eldest daughter suffered a chest wound and needed blood transfusions after being stabbed, the inquiry heard.

The mother of child M said when she reached the corner of Hart Street to collect her daughter, she was “confronted by a scene that looked like something from a film set”.

She described seeing children lying on the floor and blood along the walls.

The woman told the inquiry she ran into the building fearing her daughter was inside.

She said: “I will not describe what I saw when I went up the stairs or into the studio, other than seeing the coward lying face down on the floor being arrested.

“But that scene is burnt into my memory and is a continual companion. It haunts me, appearing both in my nightmares and during the frequent flashbacks I continue to experience daily.”

She said her daughter, who she later found sheltering in a nearby house, was physically unharmed, but “the trauma, the damage, was already done”.

Businessman Jonathan Hayes, whose office was in the same building as the dance class, told the inquiry he thought he was going to die after being stabbed by Rudakubana.

He said: “My initial feeling was one of terror, seeing a man wielding a bloody knife.

“That quickly turned to horror as I witnessed critically-injured children and began to realise what was happening. I grappled with the attacker and fell to the floor.

“Initially I didn’t even know I had been stabbed but when I looked down, I saw blood pouring out of my leg.”

He said his scar was a “physical reminder” of the attack and he suffered constant flashbacks for the first six months.

The mother of child U told the inquiry her daughter was “changed forever” after the attack, and in a state of “constant vigilance”.

In a statement read by a lawyer on her behalf, the woman said: “She carries the pain of survival. There is guilt, there is sadness, there is a deep heavy grief that she cannot name but clearly feels.

“Both of us are haunted, powerless, because it turns out monsters really do exist.”

The mother of child M said she wanted the inquiry to tell them “why was this allowed to happen”.

She said: “Why was no action taken? What change is coming, not in theory but in practice?

“How many more lives will be destroyed before the system takes responsibility?

“This inquiry is the chance, maybe the only chance, to demand real answers, to expose every failing and to force meaningful and lasting change.

“You must take this chance and you must be the change.”

The inquiry was adjourned until Tuesday, when impact statements from more parents of survivors are due to be heard.