You may have seen the footage out of the United Kingdom showing major towns and cities erupting into violence – but what you might not know is that the riots followed a brutal triple murder of three British girls. On July 29, a mass stabbing occurred at a community studio in the Meols Cop region of Southport in Northwest England. Three young girls lost their lives, and ten others were injured – eight of whom were also children.
Now, the 63-year-old businessman who got stabbed in the leg as he tried to disarm the attacker has come forward with his story, describing how he heard children screaming as he sat at his desk, starting his Monday morning.
Businessman John Hayes described how the sound of children was normal to him; he could often hear the sound of children having fun at their dance class in the studio above his office. But this time, he said, it sounded much more “sinister.” The screams, he said, were more prolonged than normal – to the point that they didn’t seem to spot. The sound became so eery that a colleague at Hayes’ company decided to look out of the window. It was at this point that the men saw a young girl on the pavement “bleeding out.”
Hayes, a father and grandfather, felt compelled to run out of his office, down the stairs, and onto the street. He said that he immediately saw people in states of panic and confusion, with two young girls already lying dead on the ground.
‘I was confronted by a young girl who was heavily bloodstained and looked like she’d been catastrophically injured – and this guy with a bloodstained knife stood in front of me, ‘ Hayes told British media this week, adding that the attacker than came at him with a knife.
As the businessman raised his hands, the attacker – who has since been named as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana – swiped the knife near his head and caught Hayes on the arm. The two men then spent a period grabbling on the ground outside of his office. Hayes attempted to grab the knife from him, at which point Rudakubana stabbed him in the leg.
The knife attack was serious for Hayes. The blade reached five inches into his leg and only just missed the femoral artery. Had Hayes been any more unlucky, he’d have died.
As you might expect of a good man who attempted to stop an attacker, Hayes insists that he isn’t a hero. But his actions seem pretty heroic to us.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, some major social media accounts claimed that the attacker was an illegal alien and an Islamist. It prompted a furious backlash in Britain’s working-class communities, where people are already angry at the successive governments and prime ministers who have failed to stem the flow of illegal aliens into the country. Despite reports revealing that the attacker was actually born in Wales, the riots continue.
The incident reflects heightened social tensions in many parts of the United Kingdom where large-scale immigration remains wildly unpopular – an issue so divisive that it arguably just lost the Conservatives an 80-seat majority to Labour.
You can read more about Hayes’ story here.
