After the terror, the heartache and the unending grief – they shared their pain. The families at the heart of this horror, who suffered in silence while hell unfurled around them, sat quietly together in the public gallery as the killer in the dock howled and cried for a paramedic.
A 14-year-old girl, who went to the Taylor Swift dance class in Southport with her younger sister, addressed an empty dock after the attacker was removed from court for a second time.
That sunny summer day had been “full of laughter and excitement,” she said, but the “nightmare started when I saw you”. “The thing I remember most about you is your eyes. You looked possessed and you didn’t look human,” she added.
The schoolgirl, addressing the court via video link, said her physical scars were healing but the psychological damage was still raw. “Things about the incident pop up on social media all the time. I feel like I can’t get away from it. Even when I’m at home and safe, it means that I feel like mentally I’m still there and experiencing it,” she added.
She learned that Axel Rudakubana had pleaded guilty on Monday, on what was supposed to be the first day of his trial, while she was at school. It was another blow, she said: “I am still so angry … This whole time we have had this build-up of anxiety and stress building up for the trial and then you just change your mind.”
The parents of Alice da Silva Aguiar remembered their “strong and confident” nine-year-old who had enjoyed “a world of dreams and unlimited potential”.
The family of three had been planning to surprise Alice with a birthday trip to Disneyland in October, just three months after she went along to a dance class to celebrate one of her favourite singers. “Life was a bliss,” they said.
Pictured with a lifesize cutout of Taylor Swift, Alice posed happily wearing a “vacay vibes” T-shirt. It was the first week of the summer holidays. They had planned to play with her friends in the garden and pool later that afternoon: “It was a perfect plan for a perfect day.”
In a statement read by Deanna Heer KC, the prosecutor, to a silent, tearful courtroom, Alice’s parents said their lives were now “a 5D horror movie”.
Alice and two other girls, six-year-old Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven – suffered fatal injuries after Rudakubana walked into the Southport dance studio on that warm Monday.
“We kept our hopes up every second during Alice’s 14-hour fight but once she had lost her fight, we lost our lives,” they said. “Everything stopped still and we froze in time and space. Our life went with her. He took us, too.”
Elsie’s mother refused to list everything her family had lost on 29 July “because we refuse to give you the satisfaction of hearing it”. In words directed at the defendant, who had by now refused to remain in court, she said: “You deliberately chose that place, fully aware there would be no parents present, fully aware that those girls were vulnerable and unable to protect themselves.
“This was not an act of impulse; it was premeditated. You chose that place, that time and those circumstances, knowing that when we arrived, all we would see was the aftermath of the devastation caused.
“We were robbed of the opportunity to protect our girls … What you did was not only cruel and pure evil; it was the act of a coward.”
Speaking from the witness box, the father of a nine-year-old girl who was stabbed three times in the chest described her as strong, beautiful, brave, full of love. “She is everything that Axel Rudakubana is not,” he said.
The schoolgirl, who cannot be named, said her friends would ask her if she wished she hadn’t been there that appalling day. “In some ways, I wish I wasn’t,” she tells them, according to her father.
But she adds: “But also, if I wasn’t there, someone else would have been stabbed and they could have died, so I’m glad I might have stopped someone else getting hurt.”
Not all families wanted to share their pain publicly. Some could not face the thought of being in the same room as the man who had wrought so much horror, so they stayed away.
Others said they had been left with constant paranoia. Afraid of the dark, loud noises, enclosed spaces, kitchen knives. “It’s like having a baby again,” said the mother of one girl. Another said her daughter’s childhood had been “destroyed”.
Leanne Lucas, the yoga instructor who organised the dance class, said she had lost “my role, my purpose and my job” and felt as if she could no longer be trusted. “As a 36-year-old woman I cannot give myself compassion or accept praise,” she said. “How can I live knowing I survived when children died?”
Lucas said she was trying to see the goodness in the world but that “the badness has been evidentially proven to exist, in plain sight, on our doorsteps, in our community”.
“To discover he had always set out to hurt the vulnerable is beyond comprehensible,” she added. Turning to address the families in the public gallery, she said: “For Alice, Elsie, Bebe, Heidi [Liddle, one of the dance teachers] and the surviving girls, I’m surviving for you.”
Rudakubana, 18, could not bring himself to hear the impact of his crimes. He twice loudly interrupted proceedings, pleading for a paramedic even though he was twice found to be fit to continue.
It was a final insult to the victims, but as he was taken down to the court cells, one word emerged from the public gallery, following him as he went: “Coward.”
