Joel Veritt was on his lunch break when he realised something was wrong at the Hart Space dance studio in Southport, the man says Sky News who were driving with a colleague when they encountered a bloodied man asking for help.
“I got out of the car and asked her if she was okay. She looked shocked and there was blood all over her body,” Verite recalled. “She was screaming, ‘He’s out there killing children, he’s out there killing children.’
After calling the authorities, Joel ran to the scene of the attack. He first found a woman in a car with “four or five” injured children in the backseat. “The woman looked at me and said, ‘I just want to make sure these kids are safe,’” he recalls.
As he tried to help the victims, the former rugby player was stopped by a man who pointed to the building and said: “He’s over there.”
Joel says he ran to the building, climbed the steps and came face to face with his attacker. “I opened the door and saw the stairs. I called out ‘hello’ to see if anyone was there. I looked up and there was a man with a knife.”
“All I saw was a knife and I thought, ‘There are people there.’ I really wanted to hit him,” he describes.
Verite ran out and shouted that the attacker was in the building. He claims it took the police about 10 minutes to arrive, but “it felt like forever.” He also remembers the first officer arriving and asking for backup, as he was only armed with a baton. A second officer arrived with a Taser, and that’s where the attacker was apprehended.
The former player admitted this. Sky News that “he is happy that he did” what he did, and “that he managed to save at least one life, if not more.”
The attack involved a 17-year-old boy who used a knife to attack several children aged between six and 10 who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at Hope Hart in Southport. Three of those killed included Alice Aguiar, a nine-year-old Portuguese girl. Ten people were injured.