HE NEVER MADE IT TO HOSPITAL
MP’s assailant queued to see him... then launched his savage attack
IT was as sudden as it was savage. A man pulled out a knife and ‘just began stabbing’ David Amess.
The ferocious attack left the 69-year-old veteran Conservative MP gasping for life on the floor of the church hall.
He was so grievously injured by ‘more than a dozen’ stab wounds that medical staff battling to save him could not stabilise him enough to take him to hospital. After two desperate hours, a helicopter air ambulance which had landed in a nearby field took off again, empty.
Sir David was a committed constituency MP who had devoted his life to meeting local residents and trying to help with their problems.
When he arrived for his regular surgery at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, shortly before midday, several were waiting to see him. John Lamb, a Conservative councillor
‘In no hurry to leave the scene’
who rushed to the church when he heard what had happened, said: ‘He was doing a surgery in the Methodist church here to speak to local people and pick up on their problems.
‘I’m told that when he went in for his surgery there were people waiting to see him, and one of them literally got a knife out and just began stabbing him. He was with a female member of staff from his constituency office and another female member of staff from his parliamentary office.’
Speaking outside the church, the shocked councillor said: ‘It has been two hours since it happened, and they are still working on him – he hasn’t been taken to hospital yet.
‘He’s a family man, he’s got four daughters and a son.’
Another witness said the MP had been ‘stabbed quite a few times’, while Sky News reported there were ‘more than a dozen’ knife wounds. The brutal assault on Sir David was over in seconds, but the knifeman does not appear to have been in a hurry to leave the murder scene.
Terrified members of the public dialled 999. Lee Jordison, 40, who works in nearby Hicks butchers, said: ‘It is very shocking. I’ve worked up here and lived up here all my life, and never seen anything like this – it’s terrible.’
Officers from Essex Police were the first to arrive, within five minutes, followed moments later by an armed response unit. They found the 25-year-old suspect still inside the church hall, and also recovered a knife. The alleged killer was led out to a police van.
Anthony Finch, 38, an electrician, said: ‘We arrived to do some work on the adjacent building. I saw an upset lady on the phone saying “You need to arrive quickly – he’s still in the building”.
‘I went into the client’s house, and when I came back out there were loads of armed police, and overhead there was an air ambulance as well as a police helicopter. I saw the suspect get put into a police van, get taken away and then they cordoned the whole road, and pushed us all down the road.
‘What we then heard was that it was David Amess. He’s very well thought of in our area – he fights for good causes and sticks up for people around here.’
As word spread, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Jeffrey Woolnough, arrived at the police cordon stretching across tree-lined Eastwood Road North, offering to administer the last rites to the devoutly Catholic MP. He said: ‘The officers said that because it
was a crime scene, and also the nature of the scene, it just wasn’t possible.’
Conservative councillor David Garston described Sir David as ‘probably one of the best constituency MPs in the country’, and said: ‘Because he was so accessible, and because he was everywhere, he obviously left himself vulnerable and didn’t think twice about it.
‘You couldn’t get very far [with him] because he’d stop every hundred yards to talk to somebody.’ Another local councillor, James Courtenay, said that surgeries were the MP’s passion and a scheduled hour-long session with constituents often stretched to four or five hours.
Sir David was meant to have been giving a speech at a dinner for the local Conservative association last night in nearby Rochford. Instead, floral tributes were being laid and more than 100 locals attended a vigil. One card left on flowers at the scene read simply: ‘Sir David Amess – RIP –such a gentleman.’
Ben-Julian Harrington, Essex Police’s chief constable, said that officers and paramedics had ‘worked extremely hard to save Sir David’.