‘I ran towards the mosque. It was just chaos’
A week on from New Zealand’s darkest day, the first journalists on the scene tell Martin Van Beynen what they saw.
George Heard was in The Press office in the central city when chief news director Joelle Dally asked him to check out a report that ‘‘cops with guns’’ were in Deans Ave. These sort of reports are common and often yield little. The 21-year-old headed off expecting to be stood down within minutes. As he was driving to Deans Ave, where the Masjid Al Noor is situated, Dally called him to say bodies had been seen outside the mosque.
It was 1.52pm, about 12 minutes after the first shots rang out. He was the first journalist at the scene.
‘‘I ran towards the mosque. It was just chaos. You could see two bodies at the door.
‘‘They talk about a pool of blood coming out of the door and you could see that. A shotgun was on the tiles and a shotgun shell also. Looking around there was a body on the centre island and a body in the gutter. Other bodies were in the driveways. A boy was slumped against the wall with his father,’’ Heard says.
A police officer yelled at him about taking pictures.
‘‘I said, ‘this is history’ and he stormed off. Ten minutes later he apologised.’’
Heard was told to stay with a group gathered in Hagley Park, over the road from the mosque.
‘‘I had two guys crying on my shoulder. They hugged me. I was shaking from the adrenalin and started smoking. They all shared this one cigarette.’’
Blair Ensor, 34, a journalist of more than 10 years with Stuff, took off with photographer John Kirk-Anderson and journalist Martin van Beynen as soon as reports of bodies came through.
Frustrated at delays, Ensor got out of the car at Canterbury Museum and jumped onto a Lime scooter. His trip took him past Christchurch Hospital where police cars were parked with horns blaring.
As he scootered down Riccarton Ave, a girl told him a gunman was loose in the park. He then went off the seal and into the trees near the mosque. He heard someone shouting through a loud hailer to get out of the park.
‘‘It was incredibly tense and police were treating everyone as a potential target,’’ Ensor said. ‘‘I spoke first to Ahmed Al-Mahmoud. He had bloody hands and had a sheet wrapped around them. He’d helped smash a window so people could get out.
‘‘The most distressing thing was this bearded guy coming around the corner wailing, ‘My wife is dead. My wife is dead’. He kept repeating that and then his friends hugged him and uttered prayers.
‘‘There was a guy there just sitting there. He could hardly talk. The one thing I remember him saying was ‘I watched him shoot kids’.
‘‘I couldn’t bring myself to take a photograph of the man who was wailing. He was surrounded by a whole lot of people from his community and he was so terribly distressed that it seemed so grossly inappropriate to pull my iPhone out and get in his face and capture his grief.’’