A Good Samaritan who was working as a window washer found himself in suburban nightmare when he stumbled upon the aftermath of the mass stabbing at a Taylor Swift-themed UK dance workshop where 3 little girls were killed and 10 other people injured.
Joel Verite and a coworker were on their lunch break on Monday when the stabbing began. As they sat in the coworker’s car, they noticed the fracas outside The Hart Space, where the 17-year-old suspect had begun his “ferocious” attack on the young girls at the kids’ event.
Verite, a 25-year-old former rugby player, saw an injured girl and ran to her aid.
“I jumped out the car and I just asked her if she was alright,” Verite told SkyNews. “She just looked in complete shock and had blood all over her body. She just screamed at me: ‘He’s killing kids over there, he’s killing kids over there’.”
Verite called police as he spotted a woman transporting “four or five” injured children in her car. She pointed to the building where the stabbing had begun. He fearlessly entered the building and came face to face with the attacker on a flight of stairs.
“I look up and there’s this guy with a knife,” he says. “We locked eyes and then he scurried off.”
“I thought: ‘There are more people in there,’ and I just wanted to hurt him so bad,” Verite recalled. “But I wanted to help people. So I came outside and I was screaming because I knew where he was.”
Verite, who is being hailed as a hero, smashed the door so that the suspect would be unable to escape. Then he told authorities where to find the attacker. While authorities nabbed the suspect, Verite helped carry injured children to safety.
Three girls were killed in the stabbings: Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, all died from their injuries.
Several other girls are still in the hospital.
Now that the attack is over, Verite is grappling with the complex emotions that follow such a heinous attack. “I’m a new dad and that was one of the hardest things for me, seeing these children in that position,” he said. “I feel disgusted and really upset for all the parents and all the children who had to go through that.”
He added that what he saw will “probably stay with me for the rest of my life.”
When he was asked if his actions were heroic, Verite demurred.
“I’m not going to label myself a hero,” he said. “I’m happy that I’ve at least managed to save at least one life, if not more.”
