A police inspector pushed through nausea and anticipating her own death as she pursued and took down a mass killer to end a shopping centre stabbing rampage.
Inspector Amy Scott on Tuesday detailed her 85 seconds inside Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre as she tracked down knife-wielding Joel Cauchi on April 13, 2024.
Experiencing psychotic symptoms, he launched an indiscriminate attack, killing six people and injuring 10 others, in a tragedy being examined at an inquest in Sydney.
“I actually felt nauseous as I ran in,” she told the NSW Coroners Court on Tuesday.
“Because in my head, I resigned myself to the fact I was probably going to die.”
As the first police officer on the scene, she found crowds of panicked shoppers streaming out of the complex in eastern Sydney, some imploring her to help.
“People starting saying to me … ‘he’s killing people, you’ve got to help us, please get in there’,” she said.
“It changed my response immediately. I considered it to be an active armed offender and I also knew that I couldn’t wait any more for my colleagues to arrive – I just had to go in.”
Finding Cauchi with the help of two tradies later dubbed “the bollard men,” Inspector Scott quietly told nearby civilians to get behind her or safely out of range of ricocheting bullets.
She then fired her pistol, 85 seconds after entering the centre and as Cauchi ran at her with his knife on the shopping mall’s air-bridge.
Two shots felled Cauchi, while a third hit a pot plant behind him.
“What was going through your mind when you fired the first shot?” counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer SC asked.
“That he was going to kill me,” Insp Scott replied.
Becoming emotional in the witness box, she commended the bravery of the other police officers who had also gone into the shopping mall not knowing what lay inside.
“We ask a lot of young police,” she said.
“We as a society think that police don’t feel fear, don’t feel the burdens and pressures of what everyday humans do.
“I can assure you that they do. They were absolutely extraordinary and they saved lives on that day.”
Two others lauded for their heroics that day told the inquest how they searched for and confronted Cauchi in the mall.
“Let’s go catch him,” Silas Despreaux said to his friend Damien Guerot after hearing about the stabbings.
The French nationals each grabbed a heavy bollard from a clothing store and followed the knife-wielding man as he moved across the floor below.
When Cauchi ascended an escalator, the pair lobbed the bollards at him.
“I knew I needed to stop him even if it meant hurting him,” Despreaux said in his police statement.
They later directed Inspector Scott to where Cauchi was, going with her in the foot pursuit and arming themselves with a plastic chair and shopping cart in the moments before she fired at him.
Outside court, the men told reporters they were not heroes.
When asked why they had gone with Inspector Scott instead of waiting outside with the other civilians, Despreaux had a simple answer.
“She was alone,” he said.
Dawn Singleton, 25, Ashlee Good, 38, Jade Young, 47, Pikria Darchia, 55, Yixuan Cheng, 27 and security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, were killed in the April 2024 attack.
The court previously was told Cauchi had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen and had been successfully treated until 2019 when he stopped his medication.
He lived a largely transient life away from the support of his parents in Toowoomba, near Brisbane and had been homeless when he set foot into the shopping centre for the last time.
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