SA Weekend: Jase Shore, the South Aussie who helped foil Sydney stabber with a milk crate on that horrific day and his next chapter as a father

He’s the man who pinned a crazed murderer to the ground in the heart of Sydney with the first thing that was available. Now he’s on to the next chapter of his life. PODCAST

He is known across the nation as “milk crate man” – the Aussie bloke lauded for helping take down a murderer with a milk crate. But now, 20 months since Jase Shore was one of a group of good Samaritans who averted potential mass devastation at the hands of a crazed knifeman in Sydney’s CBD, he is looking forward to being a family man.

The serenity of the South Brighton coastline that Shore now lovingly calls home is a world away from the terror that struck fear into innocent citygoers on that August afternoon.

And Shore has even more reason to settle down after what he describes as a “colourful life” so far. His daughter, Lily, 7, moved to Adelaide from the NT with her mum last week and will be living in the same city as her father again.

“I surround myself with my family and my daughter is a big part of that,” Shore, 40, says. “Her and I are like two peas in a pod and being able to have her here with me and being able to see her whenever I can will be amazing.”

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Shore says not being able to see Lily for almost 11 months during the height of the coronavirus pandemic last year put his life into perspective. He says the opportunity to share his life with her “will be amazing for my mental health”.

“She loves adventures and parks and anything that involves outdoor activities. Anything that I can do to spend time with her she’s happy,” Shore says. “I bought a four-wheel drive specifically for that purpose so we can go camping and fishing.”

Shore, who was born and raised in NSW, moved to Adelaide last September after his heroics and having conceded that Sydney “didn’t work out” for him and his fiancee Shelley Bryant.

He says he fell in love with South Australia in the early 2010s during frequent visits here as part of his employment in the alcohol industry, where he continues to work as ambassador for Adelaide Hills based Ambleside Distillers.

“It’s somewhere I’ve wanted to be for a long time. Every time I came down here I fell in love with the place more and more and Adelaide was a place I wanted to call home,” Shore says.

He has also established his own smoked meats business, Juicy J’s, initially making slider boxes and now moving into takeaway. “I’m talking to a few people to do pop-up events at venues … my fiancee is doing catering with grazing boxes. There’s a gap in the market so I thought I’d give it a try,” he says.

Jase Shore with daughter Lily at Brighton Beach. Picture Matt Turner.

“I enjoy cooking. People get really excited and happy about good food. If you can make up some really good food and people really enjoy it that’s a big thing for me.”

Shore admits he lost his identity and developed bad habits working late nights and long weekends in pubs and clubs during Sydney’s halcyon days during the early 2000s. There was nothing illegal involved, he just found himself surrounded by the wrong type of people.

“(I was) looking down the barrel of that and looking at life and saying, ‘Which way do you want to go?’ and I never wanted to go in that direction.

“The things I got into in Sydney were leading me down a really bad path and I always thought the best way to get myself out of that and over that would be to join the military.

“It was something I always wanted to explore. I was always interested as a kid. A good friend of mine was in the military and said I should join.

“It gave me the push to do it and kicked my own butt to join the military and straighten out my life and try something different.”

Shore speakers to journalists about his role in bringing down Sydney stabber Mert Ney. Picture: 9News

In 2006, Shore was posted to Darwin shortly after joining the army as an infantry soldier at the age of 26. The move took him out of his comfort zone and into the line of fire.

The bright lights of Sydney’s night-life could not have been further from his new reality when, in 2007, he was deployed to southern Iraq and then Baghdad for eight months.

“That was a massively eye-opening experience and I think you leave a little bit of yourself there as well with the experience that you go through,” he says. “You come back with a different experience as well and that’s also good and bad because there are some things that can come back with you that you hold on to for life.”

Shore was part of a unit guarding the Australian embassy and transporting supplies to and from Baghdad Airport along what was then the deadliest highway in the world.

“From working in bars and nightclubs to going to fully armoured vehicles and protecting public figures from the government was a completely different change in lifestyle,” he says. “We’d see cars rock up that were totalled and some of the Iraqi civilians whose cars had been blown up and people were climbing out of them and weren’t alive for too long.

“We saw bodies being pulled through the checkpoint … every day was completely different and then the fact that we got bombed often too.

“There were no casualties in the embassy when we were there, which was a blessing, but it didn’t stop the fact that there were numerous times where you thought, ‘Well, this is it’.”

Shore left the military after four years and was initially refreshed and happy but, about a month later, post-traumatic stress kicked in.

Mert Neywent on a stabbing frenzy in Sydney before he was subdued under a milk crate by Jase Shore and other members of the public. Picture: Seven News

“I woke numerous times still thinking I was in the barracks and I didn’t have my weapon attached to me,” he says. “I’d be looking around and my (former) partner would wake me up while I was trying to find my gun or my pistol because I had a ghost feeling on my leg for about six weeks.

“When you leave the house you grab keys and wallet and you’re looking for your pistol. In the NT we had amazing storms and thunder would sound like mortars so when I could hear it I would get to attention.”

During one storm, he grabbed his partner and pushed her into what, in his mind, was a barricade, to protect her from the mortars.

“I would come to and my (former) partner had no idea because all of a sudden she had been shoved under a table and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, it’s just a reaction’. When you get bombed four times a day for about three months straight … you kind of get used to that routine of being protective of people around you.”

Shore returned to hospitality in 2010 until the alcohol industry came calling and he moved into sales – and then to SA in 2018.

He was in SA for only 11 months before accepting a job in Sydney with the alcohol division of Coca-Cola Amatil. But the move back to NSW brought a life-changing experience after just 16 hours.

“Looking back it felt like one of those things where I had to be there that day. Everything that led to that point … it was very weird how the circumstances came together,” Shore says.

It was August 13, 2019 – induction day for Shore, who had arrived in NSW the night before.

A morning meeting went for half an hour longer than scheduled and so he and Henry Poole, whom he was replacing, decided to drive rather than walk to their next appointment.

Shore was texting his partner and having a laugh with Poole when he saw a young man stab a woman at the intersection of King and Clarence streets in the heart of Sydney’s CBD.

Immediately his military instincts kicked in and he jumped out of the car to chase down the frenzied attacker, who was later identified as 20-year-old Mert Ney.

“It kicked in more so when he was on Clarence Street and there was a row of us watching him acting as if he was praying to God,” Shore says. “He was going through this prayer motion and it became really real because he had a satchel with him and we were in a blast radius to be heavily affected.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t safe because if he pulls a pin and blows up something we are in the shit’ and there were a few of us standing in a row for that to happen.”

Shore says he leant against the corner of a building to protect himself as he wondered whether he would ever see Lily again. Among those watching on were Westpac IT manager Jamie Ingram, Sydney lawyer John Bamford and two firefighters.

None of them were aware of the horror already inflicted by Ney, who had stabbed and killed 24-year-old Michaela Dunn. But Shore knew he needed stopping.

The group, who have since become friends, pursued Ney down the street as he indiscriminately swung his knife at innocent people who were oblivious to the danger headed their way.

Shore is interviewed by reporters after his heroic intervention in the attack. Picture: Nine News.

“There was this woman trying to get into a shop and we were screaming at her from the top of our lungs and the street was empty with no cars, which was phenomenal,” Shore says. “(Ney) sort of swung at her with his knife and he missed her, which was confronting but also made us think we were calling his bluff again because he hadn’t done something.

“We went around a corner and he tried to stab into a car. The guy’s window was down about seven or eight inches and he put his arm in with the knife and I don’t know how he missed him.

“He ran past a cafe and that’s where I stopped because we were yelling at this cafe and there was this couple with the guy facing us and the woman facing the other way.

“We were yelling, ‘Get out of the way, get out of the way’ and they hadn’t moved and (Ney) swung at both of them. It was just sheer luck that she had moved back to look over and nothing happened to her.”

Shore says the near-miss heightened his sense of urgency to take down Ney and prompted the chasing group to pick up its speed.

He says he turned to Ingram, who he did not know at the time, and told him, “Just go, go, go, get him down, get him down’, as Ney ran towards him. “Jamie hit him with a chair and then I stood over the top of him and I knew the arrest was on,” Shore says. “He went down holding the knife but as he hit the ground the knife left his hand and it was game on.”

It was Shore’s instinctive decision to grab a milk crate to pin down Ney’s head and neck that earned him the nickname “crate man”.

“It was not the superhero name I wanted as a kid,” Shore says. “Everyone asked where I got the crate from but I have no idea. It was just there. You walk around Sydney and there are milk crates everywhere and it was the first thing I grabbed.

“My mindset was to chuck it over his head because it applied pressure over his head to his neck, which incapacitates someone quickly, and just to come down on him with something. If he had something else in his bag it gave me that distance to keep safe.”

Shore, Ingram and the two firefighters kept Ney subdued while they waited almost two minutes, which “in that situation felt like a long time” for police to arrive.

Shore says he was also forced to avert a mob mentality by placating a couple of people who had become aggressive towards Ney.

Once police arrived, Shore says chaos ensued so he decided to avoid the spotlight and walk away to check on Poole. Shore turned off all his social media accounts and only fully realised what he had been involved in when his partner told him the next day there had been a murder.

He received a message from a friend who recognised his hand tattoo on the news and went to police the next day to provide a statement. Shore says he did not sleep for the next three nights.

‘Milke crate man’. Jase Shore, back home in SA. Photo: Roy Van Der Vegt

“I don’t want to draw any more attention to (Ney). He doesn’t deserve the attention of what happened and it’s another reason I hid away from everything,” Shore says.

Ney last October pleaded guilty to murdering Dunn and seriously injuring Lin Bo.

The NSW Supreme Court heard Ney fatally stabbed Dunn after a sex work appointment and then filmed himself standing over her body.

He sent the video, in which he declared “Allahu Akbar” to a friend on Facebook Messenger and said he was a “f...ing psycho”. Ney is yet to be sentenced for his crimes.

Shore says he has not closely followed the court hearings but continues to think about Dunn and the events that unfolded in the aftermath of her death.

“My memory is for Michaela and I always say I will always remember a girl I never met,” he says. “Being a part of taking down someone who took down her and I was ashamed we couldn’t have helped her beforehand and it was a hard thing being a dad as well.

“It was a tough pill to swallow. Her memory lives on through a few of us boys and, of course, her family and friends.

“I don’t look at it any differently than how we did it because no one else got hurt outside of what happened. We were able to take down a knife-wielding maniac and stop others being hurt and that’s a pretty damn good feeling.”

Shore is now preparing to marry Bryant in the NT, where most of their friends and family are based, on May 30.

“It’s very exciting. We were booked to have a wedding in Sydney last year but COVID obviously messed up that so we had to cancel all our plans,” he says.

“Without knowing what was to come we decided to have the wedding in Darwin. We’re just going to get married … and we will look to have a honeymoon in the near future.”