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As the coronial inquest begins into last year’s mass stabbing at a Bondi Junction shopping centre, the female police officer who ended the killing spree tells how those three minutes of terror also restored her faith in humanity. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
‘You’re on your own’: The Bondi Junction stabbing inquest
On the day of the mass stabbing, Inspector Amy Scott began her shift at 6am. It was April 13, 2024. Scott had graduated from the New South Wales Police Academy almost 20 years before and was that day working as the duty officer for the Eastern Suburbs Police Area Command. She was responsible for all staff at the four police stations that comprised the region.
Until that afternoon, it had been a regular day. Scott drove between the stations and checked in on her constables. She advised officers about a sex crime they were investigating, conferred with detectives working out of Bondi.
About 3.35pm that day, Scott was on the road when her car’s radio issued a “double-beep” – the sound that heralds an urgent communication. “Eastern Suburbs car, any car in the vicinity,” the dispatcher said, “we’re getting multiple calls, multiple stabbings, multiple locations at Bondi Junction Westfield.”
Scott was very close to the location, acknowledged the job and activated her car’s lights and siren. She arrived at the shopping centre at 3.37.
“As I got out of the vehicle, people started saying to me, ‘There’s a guy in there with a knife. They’re stabbing people. He’s killing people. You’ve got to help us. Please get in there,’ ” Scott testified this week, on the second day of the coronial inquest into the mass killing.
Scott was the first officer on the scene. She ran into the mall alone, unclipping her Glock’s holster as she did so. She was immediately approached by two civilians, the French construction workers Silas Despreaux and Damien Guerot, who had moments earlier fought off the killer with bollards. “They said, ‘We saw where this guy went.’ Directed me to the escalator. And as we were going up the escalator – I don’t know which one it was – but one of them sort of tapped me on the back and said, ‘You’re on your own; we’re coming with you.’ And I sort of said, ‘That’s great, but can you guys just stay behind me the whole time? I can’t have you come in front of me.’ ”
Almost as soon as Scott arrived on level 5 of Westfield Bondi Junction, she saw the killer, Joel Cauchi. By this time, six people lay dead or dying and another 10 were gravely injured.
Early that morning, Joel Cauchi woke up on Maroubra Beach. He had spent the night in, or near, the beach’s public toilets. Cauchi was homeless, a long way from family and profoundly sick.
Originally from Queensland, at the age of 36 Cauchi began drifting between cities. Untethered from his family, who had helped broker his engagement with the mental-health system, Cauchi ceased treatment and medication for schizophrenia.
By April 2024, Cauchi, now 40, was floridly psychotic. In this week’s hearings, evidence was provided that his internet search history showed his increasing preoccupation with death and murder. He researched serial killers and read about the Columbine High School shootings. He researched knives and how best to sharpen them.
By this point, Cauchi had little contact with his parents. He would send an occasional text message, assuring them he was okay and that he was staying in a hostel. This was a lie. His parents didn’t realise that their son was both homeless and becoming increasingly deranged.
As Inspector Scott was starting her shift, Cauchi was travelling by bus to a Kennards storage facility in Waterloo. Cauchi rented a locker there, where he stashed personal belongings, including the large knife he would use in his attack.
A tapestry of CCTV and eyewitness statements from that day show Cauchi wandering, seemingly aimlessly, around the Bondi area for much of the day. Early in the afternoon, he slept on Bondi Beach. He entered, departed and re-entered the Bondi Junction shopping centre several times. The last time he did was at 3.22pm. His attack began at 3.30.
At the top of the escalator, Cauchi was 15 or 20 metres away from Scott. “His back was to me,” Scott said this week. “It was very evident that he was the person, just by the size of the knife that he was holding. And I yelled out something along the lines of, ‘Stop.’ He turned, looked in my direction and ran.”
She radioed at 3.38pm that she had sight of the assailant and that he was fleeing. “Towards Rebel, Myer, Harvey Norman, and I’m in foot pursuit.”
The mall was like “a maze”, Scott testified this week, and on her radio she rattled off the names of the stores she was passing to provide some orientation for responding officers.
Scott had unclipped her holster but had not removed her gun – she was anxious about it accidentally discharging in such a public space. Across the Westfield Bondi Junction, plenty of shoppers were still oblivious to the threat. One reason is the sheer size of the complex. Another is that no alarm had been activated yet – the only security guard rostered in the CCTV room had left for the toilet just a minute before Cauchi began his attack.
As Scott pursued the killer, her hand on her gun to prevent it slipping from its holster, she could see shoppers casually inspecting clothes in the boutique stores she was running past.
This is what police austerely describe as a “dynamic situation”. While Scott was still alone, but for the two French civilians bravely following her, she was not yet certain Cauchi was. She had heard mixed reports on the radio, as well as from the witnesses outside the mall, that there may be multiple perpetrators.
Outside a stationery store, Cauchi suddenly paused. Scott assumed he was about to stab the shopkeepers there. “He sort of looked back at me and then kept running. So in my head I was like, ‘As long as I’m chasing this guy, hopefully he’s not going to do any damage.’ But then, all of a sudden, he got about 10 metres beyond that shop and just sort of stopped, and I stopped instantaneously as well.”
Nearby, a woman was hiding herself and her baby behind a large pot plant. Scott didn’t want to give verbal instructions to the woman, lest she alert Cauchi to the woman’s presence. So, Scott desperately mouthed to her: “Run.”
Scott also sought to direct Cauchi’s attention towards her – she wanted to distract him from any potential targets, like the woman and her child. “Being cool evokes [a] response of the people around you, so if I remained as calm as I could, I hoped that everybody else would remain as calm as they could and listen to my instructions.”
Until this point, Scott’s pursuit of Cauchi has lasted only 34 seconds. At 3.38pm, Cauchi turns towards Scott. He’s now about 15 metres away from her. Then he runs straight at her.
“He just turned and started running at me,” Scott said in her first police interview. “And when he started running at me all I could get out was, ‘Stop, drop it.’ And he didn’t, so I drew my firearm.”
This week, Scott was asked what she was thinking as she fired the first shot at Cauchi. She was blunt: “That he was going to kill me.”
Scott was then asked if she was conscious of what happened after she fired that first shot.
“It’s a peculiar thing,” she replied. “It’s very fast, but in my mind it was extremely slow. I knew my first shot had hit him, but that was because of the jolt of his body, but he continued to come towards me. And I also simultaneously was saying, ‘Stop, drop it.’ And I fired two further shots because I had not been able to stop the threat with the first one.”
The second shot felled Cauchi. The third one missed him. Scott reholstered her gun, knowing she now had to secure the knife. She couldn’t see it. She realised that Cauchi had fallen on it – that it was underneath his body. At this moment, Scott wasn’t sure if Cauchi was dead. She approached him, rolled him over and kicked the knife a safe distance away.
Scott knew that one of her three shots had missed, and she directed a security guard to go see if any shopper had been hit by the stray bullet. None had. But this week she said that those five minutes, where she stayed with Cauchi and waited for the guard to return and report on whether anyone had been hit, felt like a “lifetime”.
Afterwards, when the mall was forensically examined, that stray bullet was found. It had struck the same pot plant the young woman had been hiding behind with her child.
By now, other police had arrived and they took over performing CPR on Cauchi. The shopping centre’s alarm system had been activated – after the shooting of Cauchi – and the “deafening” alarm made radio communication difficult. “I had my radio turned all the way up,” Scott remembered. “And I was still struggling to hear.”
Scott was in a curious position: until she was relieved by someone more senior, she was the scene’s commanding officer; she was, simultaneously, subject to the protocols that follow a police shooting.
It is remarkable to contemplate how quickly this all happened. Just three minutes elapsed between Scott acknowledging the job on her car’s radio and her shooting Cauchi. Less than 90 seconds passed between her entering Westfield and the final, fatal encounter.
When her senior officer arrived, Scott went to Waverley Police Station where, as protocol demands, she was tested for drugs and alcohol and interviewed about the shooting.
Before finishing her testimony at the inquest this week, Scott acknowledged the bravery of her colleagues as well as the various civilians who sought to help her or others. There was Despreaux and Guerot, of course, but many others who risked their own safety to render aid to the injured.
“You know, you had young 20-year-old shopkeepers dealing with a crisis, you know, adults turning to them going, ‘What do we do?’ And they all dealt with it. And that day, as tragic as it is, it gave me faith in humanity, restored some faith in humanity and the goodness of people.”
The inquest continues.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "‘You’re on your own’".
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