Bravery, love amid Bondi horror

Illustration by Johannes Leak.

After one of Sydney’s darkest days, when knife-wielding maniac Joel Cauchi, 40, stabbed a dozen people and killed six during a rampage at the busy Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre, the heroism of several people on the scene will long be remembered. At least three people are in a critical condition in hospital. Mother and baby Ashlee Good, 38, and Harriet, nine months were stabbed, and Ashlee, tragically, died from her wounds. But not before, bleeding from her head and face, she handed the bleeding baby to two men to try to save her. After hours of surgery, Harriet was recovering on Sunday.

More people would be dead if NSW police inspector Amy Scott, directed by bystanders, had not rushed to the scene. After yelling at Cauchi to “put it down’’, he advanced on her with the 30cm weapon. She shot him in the chest. The eight million people of NSW were deeply grateful for her heroism, Premier Chris Minns said after, commendably, returning from Tokyo, where he had only just landed for a family holiday. Bystanders at the scene were “just so helpful”, as Inspector Scott said. One man grabbed a bollard and used it to block the knifeman coming up an escalator.

Much remains to be discovered about Cauchi’s mental health and whether he should have been out and about in the community. He had no criminal history, but was known to Queensland police for “mental health welfare issues”. Apart from a security guard, Faraz Tahir, from Pakistan, all of those killed in the attack were women, and police are investigating whether Cauchi was targeting women. Questions will also be asked as to why he was not on the radar of Queensland police’s fixated persons unit. That assessment centre, as reported on Monday, deals with threats against public office-holders. But this tragedy raises the question of whether its scope needs to be expanded to be more in line with those of other state police services. Cauchi’s family in Queensland is co-operating with police. What is known is that Cauchi was diagnosed with a mental illness at 17, and his condition had declined in the past few years. In his last year in high school in Toowoomba he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Queensland Health confirmed Cauchi had been treated for mental health issues more than a decade ago, but his care was transferred to a psychiatrist in the private sector in 2012.

More recently, he had touted himself online as a male escort, offering sexual services. He also had a fixation on knives, which reportedly worried his family. And in October 2020 he wrote on a Facebook group that he was “looking for groups of people who shoot guns, including handguns, to meet up with, chat with and get to know”. The latter puts paid to foolish reactions to Saturday’s crime claiming lives would have been saved had citizens been carrying guns for self-defence. More likely, under more liberal gun laws, dozens more Bondi Junction shoppers would be dead had Cauchi been able to access a semiautomatic firearm, or any gun.

One shameful aside to the incident is that the culprit was wrongly named at one stage on social media as Benjamin Cohen. A first-year UTS student, Mr Cohen lives in Sydney’s eastern suburbs not far from Bondi but had nothing to do with the incident. In an area with a high Jewish population, the falsehood smacked of anti-Semitism on the part of despicable online trolls who raised the claim. One TV station compounded the issue by also naming Mr Cohen, before police publicly identified Cauchi as the mass killer.

The toxicity of anti-Semitic trolls was raised when NSW assistant police commissioner Tony Cooke was asked at a press conference whether police would consider investigating the social media naming of Mr Cohen as an incident of criminal public mischief designed to suggest the possibility the Bondi massacre was an act of terrorism. It wasn’t. It was a devastating crime in an everyday setting. Not surprisingly, it has resonated across the world, from Buckingham Palace to The Vatican. So has the unforgettable mother love of Dr Good, the bravery of Inspector Scott and the goodness of bystanders and first responders.