Petra Gyuricska was getting a lift to work early on Tuesday when she suddenly ordered her husband, Miklos Toldi, to stop the car – there was a man lying motionless outside Magdala tennis club. It is not the sort of thing you see very often at 5.30am in Mapperley Park, one of Nottingham’s leafiest suburbs.
“I thought maybe someone was drunk,” said the 39-year-old, “and then we saw the blood.” Another passerby called 999 and two police cars were quickly on the scene on Magdala Road, followed by an ambulance. “They started doing CPR but you could just see…” Her voice dropped as she recalled the awful scene.
They had arrived too late. The man, in his 50s, was already dead, having bled out on to the pavement. It was impossible to tell how long he had been there, or whether he had waited in vain for someone to help him in time. “There was blood running all down the road,” said Toldi. “He had been stabbed.”
Gyuricska was due at work at 6am at the Ibis hotel, so gave her details to police and went on her way. She cracked on with serving 70 breakfasts, learning later that the horror she witnessed was not the aftermath of one single, terrible incident but one of three shocking attacks to take place across Nottingham before most of the city had woken up.
She didn’t know it then but, by the time she found the man, two 19-year-old students – named locally as Barnaby Webber and Grace Kumar – had been stabbed to death in another part of the city and three people were in hospital after being run over by a van.
The van, police later said, is believed to belong to the man Gyuricska discovered dead. The working hypothesis, the chief constable later said in a press conference, is that the chief suspect, a 31-year-old man, stole the van and then used it as a weapon, before he was tasered and arrested by police.
Tuesday 13 June 2023 will be a day Nottingham will not forget in a hurry. It was almost 8am when Nottinghamshire police put out a tweet saying they were dealing with an “ongoing serious incident”.
They didn’t say what, just that a series of roads had been closed. The lack of detail made many fear the worst. It set off a wave of panic across the city as residents tried to make frantic contact with loved ones who had already left the house for school or work. The 101 police number was soon jammed with callers worried when their partners or children had failed to answer their phones.
The next police statement, shortly after 9.30am, caused further anguish when it mentioned the stabbings, the Magdala Road body and then the deliberate van attack – a fatal combination that brought back memories of a wave of Islamist terror attacks that hit the UK and Europe in 2017.
Police said they had arrested a 31-year-old man and that they believed the three incidents were linked, but it wasn’t until a press conference at 5.30pm that they said they weren’t looking for anyone else. It was an omission that prompted many Nottingham institutions to exercise caution as the day unfolded.
At Nottingham high school, a private school about a mile from Magdala Road, pupils all received an email from the deputy head. “It said we shouldn’t leave school at lunch time apart from to get food from Sainsbury’s,” said year 12 student Harrison Skinner, going home via Magdala Road on Tuesday. “Before I went to school my mum said she was going to have to take me to school because originally people thought it was a terror attack.”
Over on Ilkeston Road, where two University of Nottingham students were killed, Joey Buckingham, a 19-year-old Nottingham Trent student, said he was one of many people who had woken up to a message from his mum asking if he was ok.
“It’s really scary,” he said. “I think everyone is feeling very scared and worried in case something else happens. It happened right outside a university halls of residence.”
A few hundred yards from where the students were killed, police raided a house, kicking the door down to get in. Further up the street, two young women were led out of a house after police entered.
Word quickly spread that the first two victims were students, probably on their way back from a night out. Many students hoped it was fake news but shortly after 4pm the university confirmed the “sudden and unexpected death of two of our students following a major incident in Nottingham city centre overnight”. Tuesday’s graduation ball was cancelled.
The van attack, near the Theatre Royal on Milton Street in the city centre, was witnessed by a number of early risers. Among then was Lynn Haggitt.
“I looked round to see the police car chasing him and I saw the white van, deliberately in my opinion, went straight into two people,” she said. “The man went up in the air and the woman went on to the road. Then he backed up and sped away.”
The van was stopped by police about a mile away on Bentinck Road, another student area. Many residents said they were woken by the sound of police car sirens blaring at about 5.30am.
Dimitrious Lawani, a student, said he arrived at the scene just as the man was being pulled out of the van by a group of police officers.
The man was being “quite resistive – very resistive from what I could tell – and he was also making a lot of noise but I couldn’t really distinguish what he was saying,” said Lawani.
The police shouted: “Get down, get out, stop fighting,”he added.
Demi Ojolow, another student, said the man was “wrestling” with officers as he was dragged from the van.
Others heard the commotion but had no idea a suspected mass murderer was being detained outside. “There were two armed cars and two other police cars, sirens blaring,” said Brandon Orchard, a Nottingham Trent University student. “But we didn’t think much of it at the time, you often get police stuff around here. I didn’t even realise the van was still here until I woke up this morning.”
The van, a white Vauxhall Vivaro, had two distinct dents on its front bumper and a smashed windscreen, with items on the ground outside an open passenger door.
Despite the shock across the city, residents were keen to stress how much they loved the city. The three local MPs, Nadia Whittome, Lilian Greenwood and Alex Norris, issued a statement which resonated with many.
“Nottingham is a beautiful city, home to brilliant people from all backgrounds,” they wrote. “We are shaken by today’s events but will meet them collectively as a community and heal together.”
