Words: Kurt Bayer
Editor: David Rowe
Design: Paul Slater
Cover illustration: Rod Emmerson
Video: Ella Wilks
Motion graphic: Phil Welch
Additional reporting: Anna Leask, Claire Trevett

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Chapter One
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Rami Al had just knocked off work. Behind the high wooden fence of his family’s home in Bishopdale - the quiet, western suburb uncracked by quakes and regeneration - he entered a tranquil haven, leaving the city behind. Towering cabbage trees, burgundy-red photinia, and a light breeze plopping crab apples on to green grass. Inside, with sculpted reminders of his father’s Palestinian homeland half a world away, he started to get changed out of his work clothes.

Rami planned to meet his dad for Friday prayers at Al Noor, and was running a bit late, when his mum rang. There’d been a shooting at the mosque. No, she wasn’t joking.

“Your dad is there and you have to rush over there and see if he’s alright,” she said.

So 29-year-old Rami ran out the front door, shirtless, shoeless and cellphone fixed to his ear.

It had been a quiet Friday for Emergency Department specialist Dr Dom Fleischer. The usual sprains and strains, nothing major.

At 1.50pm, a breathless man came running in, with cuts to his hands. He said there’d been a shooting at the mosque; he’d broken a window to escape.

His claims were met with some disbelief. ED staff hear it all.

But when another man rushed in minutes later, with the same story and similar injuries, Fleischer and his staff took note.

Fleischer gathered some senior nurses and colleagues and formed a quick huddle. They concluded it could be big.

The hospital’s major incident plan was activated – a rare move that was done during the February 22, 2011 earthquake which killed 185 people in Christchurch eight years earlier.

Pagers buzzed and people ran.

All the while, just down the road, Len Peneha helped fleeing, scrambling worshippers over his fence to safety. He was numb. Unfeeling. He wasn’t afraid or panicked. A strange calmness had enveloped him, a surreal fog that muffled gunshots and screams.

Once the gunman had sped off, from the bottom of his driveway, Peneha edged to the mosque to see if he could help.

It was then that it hit him.

There were bodies crumpled grotesquely on the path. Pooling blood. Faint moans of, “Allah, Allah” amplifying into rising screams, piercing Peneha’s resistance. Suddenly there were sirens and ringing all around, people running and yelling in all directions. Peneha was done. He suffered a panic attack and felt himself shutting down.

“The shock of seeing them there was just too much,” he says. “The noise became sharper. Everything just turned on in my head. Chaos definitely ensued after that point, for me. Some of the things I saw after that ... how do you put it?”

Azila Ahmad was home with little Faiqah, 8, when her friend called to say that her son Razif, who had gone to Friday prayer with his father Rahimi, was safe. What do you mean safe? She had no idea.

“She told me there had been a shooting, that something bad had happened at the mosque and wasn’t sure about Rahimi,” Azila recalled. She tuned into the news and momentarily froze before hitting the phones.

What happened to Razif, 11, would take some time to unfurl. When the shooting started, he bolted. He followed others outside into the masjid’s rear car-park. Someone helped push over a wall. “Run,” they screamed.

A friend of Azila who had fled the ladies' room at the mosque – thanks to Husna Ahmed – saw him a few streets away. She drove him further to safety before another woman hid them inside her home for a few hours before another family friend took the boy to her Ilam Rd house. Azila was reunited about 6pm.

But they still didn’t know what had happened to Rahimi. Or where he was. It sounded like he’d been shot.

The call came about 10 minutes after the shooting began. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was in a van travelling to the site of a planned “green” school in New Plymouth. A press secretary passed her the phone: agencies had alerted the Prime Minister's Office to a shooting under way at a mosque in Christchurch. At least three had been killed. Police would have just arrived.

Ardern's van turned around and headed straight to the New Plymouth Police Station. Ardern was shocked, and quiet as she digested the news, but quickly started making decisions. She had to return to Wellington.

At home in Addington, Asma Suhail’s heart sank. She’d heard of a shooting at the masjid. And her husband Suhail - father of their wee girls Nayira, 2, and Wajiha, 5 - wasn't answering either his work or personal phone.

"I thought maybe Suhail will call me, maybe he's injured, I didn't know where he was. But he never called me," Asma said.

She phoned her older brother-in-law Naveed in Sydney. From across the Tasman, he started phoning police and St John for information on the wounded or missing. Early media reports confirmed nine dead. He kept ringing. Suhail wouldn't answer.

Meanwhile, back in Narayanganj, a city of two million people near the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, Sanjida Neha was still sleepy when she woke up on March 15. It had been early in the morning by the time she got off the phone with her husband Omar.

Around lunchtime, her family said they were off to Friday prayer. She joined them. When she arrived at the mosque, a fellow Muslim said there’d been a shooting at a masjid in Christchurch, New Zealand. Did she know?

Neha hadn’t heard of anything and was told she should tune into the news. She started ringing Omar but couldn’t get an answer. Text messages weren’t returned.

But Neha wasn’t too worried. Just a few hours earlier, Omar had gone off to work. He’d be safe.

Eventually she spoke to some of his friends. They didn’t know where Omar was.
“Everyone was pretty confused,” she says.

The longer the day went on, and she still couldn’t reach her husband, she became more and more worried.

In Wellington, at Police National Headquarters, Police Commissioner Mike Bush was briefed. Details were scant; nothing about the situation was clear or confirmed.

He was the first to front the public in a video message that went live on social media and was picked up by news organisations across the country and the world. Bush was sombre. His brief message told the public so much yet so little. 

“I need to advise that this afternoon we are dealing with a very serious and tragic series of events in the Christchurch, Canterbury area,” he began.

“They involve an active shooter. They involve multiple fatalities. We have one person in custody but we are unsure if there are other people. The multiple fatalities are, as far as we know, at two locations - a mosque at Deans Ave and another mosque at Linwood Ave. Again, we are unsure if there are any other locations outside of that area that are under threat.”

At that stage, every police officer in the Canterbury region had been mobilised to respond.   

Bush confirmed that he was in the process of mobilising “every national police resource to keep people safe”.

“I also want to ask you to stay indoors if you're in that location and I want to ask anyone thinking of going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand not to go - to close your doors until you hear from us again.”

The Prime Minister spoke publicly at 4.20pm from the Devon Hotel in New Plymouth. She gave a brief statement, barely two minutes long. At times she struggled to contain emotion.

It was, Ardern said, "one of New Zealand's darkest days".

Trauma nurse Mel Evans told a patient she had to go. She messaged on-call general surgeon James McKay that he’d better get down to ED. McKay was in the middle of an operation. When nurses passed him the message, he handed over the reins to a surgeon colleague and headed downstairs.

ED was cleared of everyday patients – back home, to GPs, medical centres, other wards - and within 2-3 minutes, scores of doctors, surgeons, nurses and other staff were coming into the emergency department. Fleischer thought it was because they had activated the major incident plan, but the hospital’s jungle drums had been beating loud and clear. It was pure word of mouth.

The ED was soon in “chaos”, Fleischer says. The first bloodied gunshot victims were being stretchered in – scooped up by passing members of the public, electricians and off-duty nurses. AOS police officers laid bleeding victims in the back of their squad cars. Paramedics raced in, ambulances stacking up. They’d done the right thing in getting them there pronto.

Soon there were reports of a “gunman loose” in the ED. Armed policemen sprinted around searching for a shooter.

The hospital was in lockdown, armed police at every entrance and exit point, patrolling perimeter.

And time was critical. These patients were bleeding to death. The only way to save their lives was to get them into an operating theatre.

But there was a problem. The same one that arose during the shaking of the quakes. Who were these people? They were mainly men, although one of the first worst-injured patients was a little girl, which hammered home the immensity of the situation. Since they had been at Friday prayer at the mosque, they’d taken off their shoes and dumped their phones and wallets. They had no identification. Who was who? A mix-up could prove fatal.

Evans gave them each a number and alongside head of surgery Greg Robertson assigned them to a bay. One critical piece of paper – even in this technological age, it was still the best way - floated around the department, saying who each person was, and whether they were to be assigned to get a CT scan or straight into surgery.

Within two hours, ED was cleared. Everyone pitched in. The usual egos and patch protection pathos were dumped as quickly as New Zealand’s global reputation as a terrorism free-zone.

Deal chucked a gown over her civilian clothes and set up the SPCU (Surgical Progressive Care Unit) to receive trauma patients straight from ED and get them ready for either surgery or the 23-bed intensive care unit (ICU).

ICU was Nikki Ford’s baby. She had worked through the quakes and immediately began drawing on that knowledge of working in extreme situations. She was thinking ahead. It was Friday afternoon ... there would be no deliveries over the weekend ... looks like supplies could be running out. She phoned one of the hospital’s private partners and begged for a chest-reopening kit. Then she hit up Timaru Hospital for a renal replacement machine to be sent up. They both arrived, and she still has no idea how.

While it was all hands to the pump, and time was of the essence, there was also the nagging thought in the back of the hospital staff’s heads, that outside a major act of terrorism was unfolding in their city. Rumours and misinformation were rampant. Police at one stage thought there could be up to nine active shooters.

Sirens blared. Schools were in lockdown. A guy in military clothing was arrested outside Papanui High. Reports of bombs in abandoned vans. Mayhem in all directions.

And the hospital staff, especially those with kids themselves, wanted to know if their own loved ones were safe. Ford phoned her son and told him to stop biking around the city and to get straight home. Some nurses found out their teenage children were traumatised after inadvertently seeing the shooter’s livestream video on social media.

Waller, who was heading to ED, phoned her husband who said he’d pick up the children from school. Racing down the stairwell, she remembers seeing an anaesthetist carrying a clear shopping bag full of syringes and medication.

“I said to her, ‘What’s happening?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I was just told to bring all of this to the emergency department’.” When Waller got to ED, the enormity of what was happening hit her. “There were just people everywhere and patients just continuously arriving and you just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be really big’.”

She spoke to her colleague McKay who directed her to one of eight operating theatres that had opened. She had two of the most critically-injured patients to deal with.

“The first patient I looked after, it was obviously just from the second I saw him that he was critically-injured and needed an operation. He had lost a lot of blood and he wasn’t going to be someone who was going to be able to be stabilised without an operation,” Waller says.

She had never experienced gunshot wounds before. The biggest mass casualty she’d ever been involved in was an Arthur’s Pass bus crash with 20 injured people – most of them not seriously injured.

“I remember one of my first questions to the ambulance officers was, ‘Did they lose much blood?’ and I look back and think it was a stupid question but I just didn’t understand the context. They just said to me, ‘We don’t know, we just literally scooped this person up and put them in the back of the ambulance’,” Waller says.  

“I felt this tidal wave of information and just a disbelief of, ‘How has this happened to these people? How has this happened in Christchurch?’ I never for a second thought that in my career I’d be dealing with a mass shooting in New Zealand, but here we are. You just have to go on your training and the gut instinct that this is best for them. You make a decision and you go.”

Azila and the kids rushed to Christchurch Hospital early that evening. It was chaos inside there, with dozens of survivors and family members desperately trying to find loved ones. Azila bumped into a Malaysian doctor she knew who told her he thought he’d seen Rahimi in intensive care. Another friend who worked there as a scientist started asking around. A photo of her husband was passed around nurses.

Finally, about 10pm, she found him. Unconscious and undergoing surgery. But stable. “Alhamdulillah, he’s still safe,” Azila said.

The bullet had entered his lower right back area and injured his spine and abdomen. He was in a coma, still unaware of what had happened to his son.

By the time she spoke again publicly at 7.25pm, Ardern was describing it as a terrorist attack. New Zealand was reeling, and Ardern said she knew many would be questioning how it could happen here.

Those words were among the many that Ardern herself had inserted into her statements over that period, words that came to epitomise her response and that of New Zealanders.

Forty were confirmed dead at that point. There were four people in custody suspected of being connected to the attacks. All but one were later cleared of direct involvement.

Farid and Husna Ahmed’s compact, brick family home was full of anger and tears and frustration and questions. But none of them belonged to Farid, who’d just lost the love of his life. He went around the 50-odd people gathered in his home which doubled as his homeopathy studio and held their hand, talked to them and gave consolidation. He answered their questions. “I was in control even though I was very sad,” he remembers. He wanted to be strong for them – and his teenage daughter Shifa.  

But at 11pm, when his house cleared and darkness and silence descended, he was finally alone with his daughter. Earlier that evening, he wanted her to have time to grieve and talk with her friends. Now, he wanted a family meeting, with one topic on the agenda: How do we move forward from here?

The way he Farid saw it, they had two choices: to “ruin themselves” by mourning, wailing, and grieving, or to turn their shared grief into a positive thing. Without much discussion, they unanimously agreed on the second choice.

“That gave me a lot of strength,” he says, “because when I found my 15-year-old daughter was with me, sharing the same feeling, I felt, ‘Woah. We are a team, we can do something better’.”

They even talked about the killer that night. Farid put the question to his daughter: How do you feel about him? She felt sympathy for him. They were on the same page.

And he knew then, they would be okay.

End of Chapter Two 
Tomorrow, Chapter Three:
MARCH 16 – THE DAY AFTER

Where to get help
If you or someone else is in danger, call 111. If you need to talk, these free helplines operate 24/7

Depression helpline: 0800 111 757
Lifeline: 0800 543 354
Need to talk? Call or text 1737
Samaritans: 0800 726 666
Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234