Shooting victim too afraid to sleep

Mohd Nazril Hisham Omar has barely slept since last Friday. One of the few times he did, after surgery, he woke up and screamed.

To his groggy eyes, the uniformed police officer at his bedside looked a lot like the military-clad gunman who nearly killed him.

‘‘The [gunman] was in full [military] gear,’’ said his wife Zurinawati Mohi. ‘‘Just like a police officer. With the bulletproof vest and helmet. He screamed for me because I was outside.’’

Nazril, 46, was about to begin praying at the Al Noor mosque on Friday when he heard what sounded like fire crackers. As bodies fell around him, he saw the gunman and stood up to run but was shot in his feet. He staggered up again but was shot in the back as he fled.

‘‘After that, he was thinking that he had already died,’’ said Zurinawati.

‘‘Luckily, the pile of bodies was on top of him. He could sense that the person was still walking around [shooting] everywhere.

‘‘He could feel the blood ... inside his mouth, his eyes, his nose, everywhere. Probably what let him survive was that he was at the lowest part [of the pile].’’

Nazril has since had three operations. He refuses strong medication as much as possible – any drug that might put him to sleep and trigger a repeat of the panic he felt at seeing a police officer, his wife said.

‘‘He doesn’t want to sleep at night. I don’t think he really sleeps. I think he just closes his eyes ... Every time the nurse comes in with medication, he will ask, ‘What is it for?’ ’’

Zurinawati rushed to her husband’s bedside when she heard about the attacks, having just returned home to Malaysia, where she was living for now with the couple’s oldest child.

Nazril and the three younger children, all boys, live in Christchurch, where Nazril is employed at Foodstuffs.

The two middle boys, aged 18 and 14, attend Burnside High School, where shooting victim Muhammad Haziq MohdTarmizi also went.

The two families were friendly, and Zurinawati saw Haziq and his family at a breakfast on the Sunday before the attacks.

She had spoken to Haziq’s mother this week, she said, but her main focus was her husband’s recovery.

He was responding to treatment – even walking a little yesterday – but was still haunted by the memories of the shooting.

‘‘He still remembers clearly what happened.’’