A mother’s tale of mall horror
Then I realized I’d been shot. I felt the physical force going into my body
It was one of the most dramatic moments of the dreadful assault on Kenya’s Westgate mall — the moment a four-year-old boy, having been unexpectedly spared by an al-Qaedainspired terrorist, told the gunman he was a “bad man” and should let everyone go. For the first time, Amber Prior, mother of the boy, tells of her family’s terrifying ordeal at the hands of the militant Islamist group al-Shabab. Zoe Flood reports from Nairobi. It was a sunny Saturday morning when Amber Prior arrived at the Westgate Shopping Mall with her six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son.
All around there were people — some had come for brunch on the Artcaffe terrace, others to try on trainers at the Adidas shop or run an errand at barclays.
Ms. Prior went into the vast two-storey Nakumatt supermarket. “We were pretty much finished and I’d got the kids near the tills and then I remembered I wanted to get a bottle of wine.”
but as the 35 year-old popped back into the store and her children, who are French nationals, waited by the checkout, an ordinary Saturday shop began to spiral rapidly into a nightmare.
“Lots of screaming” followed by “gunshots outside the mall.” “I started running toward my kids, running against the crowd. I found them with almost no one else around them, everybody else had scattered,” she said.
She picked up her youngest child and together they ran to the back of the store. She remembers people thinking it would “blow over.” She joined a group trying to leave via a back exit but people came running back in, saying there was shooting there, too.
“People were screaming, ‘you’ve got to hide, you’ve got to hide,’” Ms. Prior said.
Ms. Prior crouched down behind a deli-style counter with several other families, customers and employees.
“The gunfire was going off constantly; every 15 seconds you would hear a shot,” she said. As time went on — time which felt “like eternity” — Ms. Prior realized that “it wasn’t going to stop very quickly.”
To hide better, she took her children further back into the meat section and tried to “squeeze them under” the large fridges there, before lying on top of them.
They were soon joined by several others — three women with children, a young Kenyan girl who had been separated from her parents, and about five men.
“We kept hiding and time kept ticking on and then at some point we heard the footsteps coming closer.
“The girl next to me said: ‘I can see him, I can see him.’ She was shaking next to me.”
Ms. Prior didn’t think the man would knowingly shoot women and children. but for nearly 20 seconds, a gunman fired into the huddled people. She remembers very deliberate shots, one after the other.
“Then I realized I’d been shot. I felt the physical force going into my body. I was petrified and didn’t move much, but I kept wriggling my toes and thinking, if I can feel my toes I’m going to be OK.”
“And then it stopped. And he walked away. People around me started screaming. Others didn’t make a noise. At that point I put my head up. There was blood everywhere.”
A mother and daughter next to her, Muslims of South Asian origin, had been killed. The son was alive but had been shot and was in great distress.
At 1:19 p.m., her husband daniel who, since hearing that his family was hiding in the supermarket, had been frantically trying to get rescuers to them — received a text from his wife that read simply “I’ve been shot.”
“My heart jumped out of my mouth. I didn’t know how someone who had been shot could text,” he said. In the supermarket the attackers continued their rampage and as “time went on,” remembers Ms. Prior, her fear deepened.
“People who were dying died or got so weak they weren’t making noises. We were just so scared — it felt like no one was coming to help, that it was never going to end, that I was going to die like everybody else. I didn’t want to die on top of my kids.”
The few survivors waited, listening as the power came and went, the fridges turning on and off, the cheery store music going quiet and then returning.
“At some point, the footsteps came back — we were all very scared. He said: ‘If there’s any children alive here, we’ll let them go, we won’t hurt them.’ but nobody moved.”
“And then, I don’t know why, I don’t know where it came from, even now I can’t imagine why on earth I decided ... I stood up.”
“Probably I thought it was our last chance — I said my kids are here and alive, please let them go. He said fine, but you’ll have to stay. And then he started talking to me.”
Standing on the bloodsoaked floor of the meat section, the man, whom Ms. Prior described as looking Somali, dressed in black and carrying a large gun, told her that they were “not monsters.”
“We just want people to understand they can’t come to our homes and kill us ... we will do the same to them,” he said, speaking in good english. “I want you to forgive us.”
He asked her where she was from — France, she replied — and he said they were only interested in the Americans and Kenyans. Ms. Prior and her children began to move to the exit when the man said the boy whose mother and sister had died could leave too.
As the boy hobbled towards Ms. Prior, the gunman said she should carry him. Weakened by blood loss and strug- gling to breathe, she asked if she could put him on a trolley.
As she fetched a trolley, the attacker walked ahead a little with her children. She remembered the Kenyan girl and asked the gunman if she could come too. Pushing the injured boy and coaxing the terrified girl, Ms. Prior joined her children near the checkout.
“It seemed like the terrorist was giving them Mars bars, but my son also sounded like he was telling the terrorists off,” said Ms. Prior. The children recall the boy telling the gunman he was a “bad man” and that he “should let everyone go.”
Still the gunman wanted to speak to her — “Wait, let me explain this to you,” he said — while also assuring her that they wouldn’t be hurt as they tried to exit the mall. He then noticed that she’d been shot and apologized to her. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he said.
The group of five — one adult, four children, two shot, all petrified — crossed the atrium, past a “blown out” car, a prize giveaway, past several dead bodies. reaching the main stairs where police and photographers were gathered, Ms. Prior’s daughter told her quietly: “I don’t want to do any more shopping today.”
Two weeks after the attack, Ms. Prior is still recovering in hospital. She was shot in the left thigh but the bullet passed through her body, exiting near her right hip. The family estimates that an hour passed between the shooting and reaching an ambulance.
“I’m very grateful — I don’t know for what reason he decided to come and then let us go. Why at that particular time, why me?” she said.
Ms. Prior is calm but at times, when the memory of the ordeal is too vivid, becomes overwhelmed.
“Killing people for what? That poor woman and her daughter [who died next to Ms. Prior and whose son she saved], what did they do to anybody?
“That woman, because we were both mothers, we kept looking at each other — it’s going to be OK — giving encouraging looks as we hugged our kids. but she didn’t make it.”