Liverpool bomb set me off...I’m always getting flashbacks
– FISHMONGER HALL HERO JOHN CRILLY
WHEN John Crilly saw a bomb had gone off outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital, his thoughts went immediately to the hero cab driver David Perry.
“It set me off if I’m honest,” he says. “Flashbacks to London Bridge. I get them all the time seeing people dead, and I just burst out crying.
“It can be loud noises, things on the telly, the Liverpool bomb. Visual things. I need someone to go into my head and stop them.”
It’s two years today since John Crilly became a hero, just for one day.
He was at an ex-offenders education conference in Fishmongers’ Hall in London when one of the attendees began stabbing people with knives strapped to each wrist.
Usman Khan then opened his coat to reveal a suicide vest, which he threatened to detonate.
Images of John turning a fire extinguisher on Khan on London Bridge – while another attendee chased him
with a narwhal tusk grabbed from a wall and a third man tried to grapple him – went viral all over the world.
Khan’s terror attack ended when John and others jumped on him, still believing his suicide vest was about to detonate on one of London’s busiest bridges. The jihadi was then shot dead by police and his suicide belt revealed to be fake.
“That first day we were heroes,” 50-year-old John remembers. “Then by day two we were murderers.”
John was attending the conference because he has a previous conviction for manslaughter after a burglary when he was young went wrong.
Steven Gallant, who also tackled 28-year-old Khan, was on day release from a sentence for murder.
John says: “No matter how many times I said, ‘I’m not a murderer’, it never made a difference.”
The third man on the bridge was Darryn Frost, a communications officer in the Ministry of Justice, who chased Khan with the 5ft ornamental narwhal tusk.
John, who lives in Cambridge, says they all keep in touch as they struggle to deal with the aftermath of the attack.
With the death of Khan’s two victims, John lost his pal, law student Jack Merritt, 25, who