I was on the fourth floor of the David Jones department store at Bondi Junction Westfield at 3.35pm when another shopper came up behind me and said: “There’s been a stabbing, it’s happening – a shooting, stabbing – we have to go.”
I could see in her face that she had seen something, and it was real. I think she was clutching her daughter’s hand.
I headed towards the rear of the store, looking for a fire escape. I found a cupboard with a fire extinguisher in it. It was tiny and dark and I was afraid to close the door fully, so decided it didn’t give me much protection and I kept moving.
Around a corner I found a fire escape with half a dozen shoppers standing outside it. A few were saying, should we leave? I realised they’d only heard shouting and weren’t sure what was happening.
I said yes, we have to go.
There were five or six more people standing inside the fire escape who were on their phones. I said let’s go, we need to move. I didn’t want to start a panic – but I knew they hadn’t seen that woman’s face.
Halfway down, the security alarm started sounding, then we reached the street and I heard the first siren.
I sent videos of shoppers fleeing the centre to Guardian Australia’s news desk, and talked to all the witnesses I could find about what they’d seen.
One woman had seen a man stab a woman at a cafe. Others had heard gunfire, one saying it sounded like a cap gun, another that it boomed all the way through her: “I felt it in my bones.”
People reported seeing the attacker in different parts of the shopping centre. I thought at first they were confused, then I realised he must have been attacking different people in different places.
The police and ambulance sirens were incessant – I gave up counting after hearing 30 vehicles pull up.
The helicopters started circling as the first media reports came through. From time to time a shout would go up saying: “Run! run! There’s a shooter!” And so we ran.
At one point a man who sounded like a police officer bellowed at us to move, but we didn’t know which direction was safe. I hid behind a wall in the front yard of a home.
Then the flurry of panic would end, and we would assemble again in small groups, checking in on each other and sharing what we knew. There were photos from social media of groups of shoppers in the rooftop car park with their hands in the air, armed police drawing down on them.
I was interviewing one shop worker who showed me a photo of the suspect from his store’s security camera when a man with an ashen face and blood on his trousers told me to stop asking questions – it wasn’t appropriate, he’d seen what happened and to leave the worker alone.
“It’s not nice,” he said. I said I knew that, that I’d been terrified. (When I play the recording back now I can hear he was telling me to “stay on the sidelines”.)
I went from group to group asking people what they’d seen or heard. Then, as it became dark, I joined a big media pack near the main entrance to the centre, with emergency vehicles as far as the eye could see.
Witnesses were telling TV reporters about seeing the attacker. “It was so eerie, there was no noise,” one man said.
“He was just so quiet, that was the scariest part,” said another, who had also seen the police officer in pursuit and seen the aftermath of her shooting. “It’s even scarier when you find out later that he’d actually already hurt people by that point.”
A news photographer asked if I was OK. I said yes, I’m fine, why do you ask? “I can see it in your face,” she said.
Nikki Marshall is Guardian Australia’s production editor
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