HOW SHOPKEEPER
AS a hooded maniac hacked at him with a foot-long knife, shopkeeper Barry Crawley realised there was only one way to save himself.
“I knew he wasn’t going to stop,” he said. “So I had to go for him.”
Barry was completely unarmed. He was bleeding from multiple wounds and his arm was fractured.
But he still took on the knifeman, wrestled him to the floor, put him in a headlock and held him down until police arrived.
The CCTV cameras in Barry’s shop in Govan, Glasgow, filmed the whole terrifying attack.
And Barry, 38, relived it yesterday as the thug, Alan Thomson, 25, sat in jail awaiting sentence.
Barry was cashing up at the till when Thomson burst in on October 9 last year.
“I was doing my money and my head was down at the counter, “Barry recalled. “I knew someone had come in but I usually let people look around for a bit before dealing with them.
“As soon as I looked up, a large knife came swinging past my face. It just missed my face, by less than a centimetre.”
Thomson had planned the attack. He wore a hooded top and a scarf over his face and armed himself with a vicious curved blade.
“He swung again and hit my chest,” Barry said. “Then he tried to get round the back of the counter.”
Thomson went round to the side of the counter and began lunging through the door with the knife. Barry said: “He swung it about eight times on to my arm. My thumb was hanging off and my arm was broken.
“I’m lucky he never actually stabbed me with it. Luckily, the knife was too big to actually do it.”
With amazing understatement, Barry described the attack as “a frightening experience”.
But instinct took over and he fought back. He burst out from behind the counter and grappled with Thomson.
As they continued to wrestle, Barry and Thomson crashed through a pile of boxes of crisps and landed on the floor. Thomson dropped the knife.
Then Barry managed to get the thug in a headlock and squeezed. He held on to