Personal trainer recounts encounter with Southport killer wielding a 20cm knife
A personal trainer told how Southport killer Axel Rudakubana stared down at him wielding a 20cm knife during his murderous rampage at a dance studio.
Joel Verite, 26, was helping a friend with his window cleaning business on July 29 last year, with windows down and their music on, when they saw yoga teacher Leanne Lucas slumped against a car.
The happy mood immediately shattered, he jumped out of the van they were driving as she shouted ‘He’s stabbing kids in there’, pointing up to the studio where a Taylor Swift-themed class for children was taking place.
Speaking out for the first time, Joel told The Sun that as he ran towards the scene, another woman frantically beeped her horn and he saw she had ‘four or five’ girls there, including one seriously injured.
Joel bravely went into the studio, in just his shorts and work boats, fearing that ‘this awful thing is still going on’.
After getting inside and shouting to see what was happening, he came face to face with the killer.
‘I looked up and literally he’s come and circled round and looked at me,’ Joel said. ‘He had his hood up and a big kitchen knife.’
Police respond to Hart Street in Southport, Merseyside (Picture: James Speakman/PA Wire)
There was blood ‘everywhere’ on the stairs, and Joel told how he felt ‘frozen’ trying to think what to do.
‘What I witnessed was like a scene from a disaster movie,’ he said.’ The horror will live with me forever.’
Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were killed in the knife attack at The Hart Space in Merseyside.
The killer, then aged 17, entered the building just before midday in a plan to ‘kill as many people as he could’, a court heard.
He stabbed 10 others in the attack, with the descriptions of what happened inside the building being so horrific the families of the victims begged the media to not report on the full extent of it.
Dad-of-two Joel said: ‘I might not be here today if I did actually do what I probably really wanted to do’.
He grabbed a bin and smashed a glass door so that the killer could not lock himself inside to continue his massacre, and turned back to get reinforcements, returning soon afterwards with mechanics and makeshift weapons.
It wasn’t long before police arrived armed with a taser, and ‘tackled that piece of s***.’
Joel followed them into the studio and picked up a young girl terribly injured, who he later learned was the youngest victim, Bebe King.
(Left to right) Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar (Picture: Merseyside Police/PA Wire)
Flowers and tributes outside the Atkinson Art Centre Southport following the knife attack (Picture: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire)
By this point, paramedics and firefighters were arriving too, and the full scale of the horror was being realised.
Joel, a former Wigan Warriors academy rugby player, still refuses to say the name of the killer.
The parents of Elsie and Bebe spoke out this week for the first time since their deaths, to make sure the girls are remembered for their ‘happy personalities’ rather than the attacks.
Jenni Stancombe, Elsie’s mum, told The Sunday Times she is worried she will never be able to find the words to do her daughter justice.
She said: ‘It was an honour to be her mum. Sometimes I think people are born special, and I genuinely believe she was.’
Jenni and her husband David had hired Leanne Lucas, who suffered life changing injuries as she tried desperately to save the children, as a tutor to help Elsie with her reading and writing.
‘I was just trying to give her a better start in life, that’s all it was,’ Jennie said.
Bebe’s parents, who cannot be named due to a court order, said their daughter had an ‘innate kindness to her’.
Her mum said: ‘One of the things that was really special about her was that she was hilarious. Even as a baby she would have me belly laughing.’
Bebe’s dad, who works for HMRC, described his daughter as being ‘so confident’.
Thinking back to her birthday parties, he remembered Bebe ‘going up to the shyer children and literally just pulling them in’.
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