‘I CAN STILL SMELL THE SMOKE OF THE GUNS’... GREYSTEEL WITNESS TELLS OF BEING AMONG FIRST ON THE SCENE
Cabbie who was first on the scene relives horror and tells of trying to shield relatives from carnage
A MAN who was one of the first on the scene after the Greysteel massacre has said the horror he witnessed that night will stay with him for ever.
Andre Johnston (51), from Claudy, was working as a parttime cabbie on October 30, 1993.
He entered the Rising Sun bar not long after the shooting had stopped and the UFF killers had fled.
Hours later Mr Johnston, who also worked for a funeral director, returned to remove the dead.
As the village prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the atrocity in which eight people died, he said the horror remained all too vivid.
“It feels like yesterday. I was working as an undertaker and was doing taxi driving at night. I was working on the night of the attack,” he explained.
“I had got a fare and was driving back into Greysteel past the Rising Sun when the dispatcher put it out over the radio that there had just that minute been an attack on the bar.
“I don’t know why but I pulled straight into the bar.
“I had the intention that if I saw a car, I was going to ram it off the road.
“I pulled up outside the bar and I ran in. I opened the door and went in and saw what had been left. The smoke from the guns was still there, the smell of it was horrible. It was just minutes after the gunmen had left.”
The eight who died were Karen Thompson (19) and her boyfriend Stephen Mullan (20); James Moore (81), the father of the bar’s owner; Joseph McDermott (60); Moira Duddy (59); John Moyne (50), and ex-UDR man John Burns (54).
Former B Special Victor Montgomery (76) died the following April after blood clots from a leg wound spread to his lungs.
Mr Johnston, whose 16-yearold daughter Alexandra passed away in January after a cancer battle, recalled the harrowing scenes as he entered the pub.
“The victims were there in the bar. It was an horrendous sight. Young and old,” he said.
“There was a young woman still sitting in her seat, dead. There was an older man at the door, they must have got him when they came in the door.
“There was a woman who I had dropped off in my taxi just hours earlier.
“These were people I knew, they were friends.
“It was horrendous to witness something as horrific as that, to see what people can do.
“There was no reason, no country, no anything, there is nothing in this world that could possibly justify that kind of destruction.”
Mr Johnston said his first thoughts were for the victims’ families.
“I walked to the door and had the mind to try and stop any relatives of those poor people coming in to see this until the police arrived. I just knew that they would be scarred for life,” he said. “Greysteel is such a small village, when people heard what had happened they ran down and were there in minutes. In the end I had to stand back and let them go in. The police arrived then. It was mayhem, no one seemed to know what to do. The ambulances hadn’t arrived yet.
“Panic struck and there was a worry that the nearby Longfield Inn would be targeted. But the police said that those who had done this had done their hit and would be away now.
“Survivors were standing around in absolute shock. I did what I could to comfort the husband of one of the victims. I just put him down on the chair and sat with him, stayed with him. Ambulances arrived and people were trying to get people out into them.
“People were starting to filter in. There was a priest there and the reality of it all started to filter through.”
Mr Johnston, who worked with his father-in-law at their Coleraine funeral directors Ivan Murdock and Sons, found himself back at the Rising Sun in the early hours of the morning removing the bodies of the dead.
“I went home later that night,” he added.
“At 3am my father-in-law called me and said that we needed to go back down to the Rising Sun and remove the bodies of those who had passed away.
“We arrived there with our hearses and were able to take the people out before the morning, before the Press came, in the quiet of night.”
He said he was still affected by that night.
“I can still smell the smoke from their guns 25 years later,” he added. “That night still haunts me. It took me two years tocryaboutit,toreleaseit.
“I went to counselling. My mother thought that it changed me. I try not to think about it.
“But it comes into my mind a lot, maybe it’s a news story about some other atrocity in the Troubles.
“You just think to yourself that nothing justifies doing that to another human being, on either side.
“To this day Halloween wouldn’t be a great holiday. We might do something for the children but that’s it. Every year it brings it back. It’s like it happened yesterday. Once you see something like that, you never forget.”
Mr Johnston also recalled the devastating impact the atrocity had on the community, just a week after the Shankill bomb which killed nine people and one of the IRA bombers.
“It shook our community so much,” he added.
“A lot of people who might have had strong political feelings one way or another, it changed them completely.
“Unfortunately, it took something like that to do it.
“For two atrocities like the Shankill bomb and then Greysteel to happen within a week, it made people think that something has to be done.
“It brought the community strongly together. It was a day in the Troubles that should never have happened.”
❝ Two atrocities in a week made people think something has to be done