Australia struggles with how, why after stabbing rampage

SYDNEY — On a perfect mid-autumn day, the scene at an upscale suburban mall in Sydney was as humdrum as it was idyllic: mothers pushing strollers, gaggles of teenagers being young, families whiling away the weekend afternoon.

But in a matter of minutes Saturday, the sprawling, multistory mall instead became a site of panic, chaos and terror. Only 1 mile from the famous Bondi Beach in eastern Sydney, a knife-wielding attacker stabbed nearly 20 people, including a 9-month-old girl. Six of the victims, including the girl’s mother, died, and about a dozen others were being treated at hospitals. The attacker — whose motives remain unclear — was shot and killed by a police officer.

It was one of the deadliest mass killings in Australia in recent decades and has left many in shock, questioning how a tragedy of this magnitude could occur in a country known for its relative safety.

People in the surrounding community said the violence was all the more unsettling because the mall was such a hub of life that everyone had just been to or was about to visit. Familiar backdrops — the Lego store, a boba stand, clothing shops — had become crime scenes and parts of traumatic memories.

“These things don’t happen in Australia,” said Kristie Spong, 54, who had been to the mall with her daughter a few days earlier and returned Sunday to lay flowers, her makeup running down her face through tears. “We just think we’re a blessed country because we have good gun control.”

Police Sunday were combing through a crime scene spanning several floors of the Westfield Bondi Junction mall, which remained cordoned off. They were also going through footage from CCTV cameras and interviewing hundreds of witnesses to Saturday’s attack, trying to piece together the chronology of a rampage that punctured a sense of security in this wealthy suburb of Australia’s largest city.

Portraits of the victims, all but one of whom were women, began to emerge. They included a first-time mother, a security guard who tried to stop the attacker and a young fashion employee, according to statements from those who knew them.

Police officials identified the attacker as Joel Cauchi, 40, who arrived in the Sydney area a month ago from Queensland, in the country’s northeast.

Why the man, who police said had a history of mental illness, began terrorizing shoppers Saturday afternoon, moving through the upper floors of the mall dressed in a rugby jersey and stabbing people with a long knife, remained unclear.

“There is still to this point nothing we have received that would suggest this was driven by any particular motivation, ideology or otherwise,” Anthony Cooke, assistant police commissioner for New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney, said at a news briefing Sunday morning.

Asked if the attacker appeared to single out women, Karen Webb, the state’s police commissioner, said that would be an “obvious” line of inquiry for police.

“I think anyone seeing that footage can see that for themselves,” she said, referring to his victims.

Hedy Davant, 71, who has lived a couple of blocks from the mall for three decades and visited the makeshift memorial Sunday, said the pattern seemed apparent to her.

“It’s so cowardly,” she said. “He avoided the men and went for the women and children.”

Huma Hussainy, 33, said she stepped out of the Lululemon store on the fourth floor after hearing screaming Saturday and made eye contact with the attacker, who was a short distance to her right carrying a knife that she remembered as being more than 1 foot long. She looked left and saw two people collapsed on the floor, surrounded by pools of blood.

“His face was so angry, and his knife was ready — the way he was holding the knife,” she said. She dashed back inside to try to find a place to hide.

The rampage ultimately came to an end at the swift actions of a woman: Amy Scott, a police inspector whom authorities repeatedly praised as having averted what could have been a much larger tragedy by shooting the attacker dead.

Cauchi had had a number of interactions with police in Queensland because of his illness, authorities said, but he had never been arrested. Authorities did not describe what those problems were.

His family, who was not in regular communication with him, contacted police when they saw TV broadcasts of the attack and recognized him, according to police. In a statement, his family called his actions “truly horrific,” saying they were still trying to comprehend what happened.

Until more police officers and medical personnel arrived at the scene, fellow shoppers tried to help the victims.

Andrew Reid, a lifeguard, asked a department store that had been locked down to raise its shutters so he could enter the mall to help a woman who appeared to be rapidly bleeding out from a stab wound in her back. With others, he did what he could and moved on to a second woman who was collapsed nearby, with a bad gash in her chest.

“There was just a lot of blood,” he recalled. “They were just bleeding out, the poor people.”

By Sunday evening, police had released the identities of two victims, Jade Young and Pikria Darchia. Young, 47, was a mother of two who was active in a local surf lifesaving club.

Darchia, 55, was an artist and designer, according to her LinkedIn page.

The family of another victim, Ashlee Good, said in a statement that she and her baby daughter were among those stabbed. The baby underwent hours of surgery Saturday and was doing well, the family said, but Good, 38, did not survive.

“We are struggling to come to terms with what has occurred,” Good’s family said in the statement Sunday.

Reid, the lifeguard, said he was stunned to learn later that another of the victims was Good, a friend whom he had been in a running group with for nearly a decade. Only then did he think back to an empty stroller he had seen in one of the stores nearby.

“She was a most beautiful soul,” he said. “She wanted to be a mom, and she got that opportunity nine months ago.”

The Ahmadiyya Muslim community said in a statement that Faraz Tahir, 30, a security guard, had died trying to protect others during the attack. He arrived in Australia a year ago as a migrant from his native Pakistan, where the Ahmadi religious minority is frequently persecuted. He quickly became a dedicated member of the local Muslim community, the statement said. Saturday was his first time working a shift at Bondi Junction’s Westfield shopping mall, according to Mirza Sharif, a spokesperson for the community.

In another social media statement, the White Fox Boutique, an online fashion retailer, said that one of its employees, Dawn Singleton, was among the victims. She was an e-commerce assistant who had graduated from college in 2019, according to her page on LinkedIn.

By midday Sunday, a makeshift memorial across the street from the mall had grown to a pile of about 100 bouquets of flowers, wreaths and a balloon, and residents walking their dogs or with their morning coffees stood nearby talking about their disbelief at what had happened.

Rabbi Mendel Kastel, chief executive of the nearby Jewish House crisis center who is also a police chaplain, said people were coming up to him to express how deeply affected they were by Saturday’s events.

“It’s a very pleasant community; people look out for each other,” he said. “Something like this shakes everybody to the core.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.