When Mike Andrews came to Ezmeralda Johns aid after she was stabbed in a supermarket terror attack he promised they'd one day celebrate a birthday together - yesterday, they did. Photo / Michael Craig
Warning: Graphic content
The first thing Mike Andrews asks for is a box of tissues.
"I'm pretty good at crying these days", he says, 11 months after he saw terrorist Ahamed Samsudeen try to behead Ezmeralda Johns with a kitchen knife in a suburban Auckland supermarket, and then watched the blade turn his way as his mind went to his wife and kids, and all the things left unsaid when he went to buy ingredients for home-made pizza.
"I thought, 'F***, I'm not gonna see my kids again', says Andrews, speaking publicly for the first time about the moment he challenged the Isis-inspired attacker and was rewarded with the pointy end of a knife inches from his face.
"[I thought] 'Oh, you've f***en overcooked it, this is dumb - the kids are in the car and wife's at home'. I'd just said goodbye to her, because she was in a hurry [for an online work meeting] and I didn't spend any time talking to her, and I didn't say to the boys I loved them."
Seconds earlier he'd been running from Countdown LynnMall, after hearing a commotion so unexpected on a quiet level 4 lockdown afternoon that he at first wasn't sure if he was hearing laughter or screams.
Then, people were running, someone fell and another yelled, "He's got a knife."
As shoppers scattered, Andrews, his trolley in front, made it as far as the mall entrance.
"I was like, 'F***, there'll be somebody inside that'll be hurt'."
He turned around.
It was a split-second decision that's left the full-time dad with mental trauma he expects to manage the rest of his life, and a strong belief it's a legacy he is unlikely to carry alone.
Its burdens can emerge in the most innocuous of circumstances, among them a Santa parade with his sons in December.
Andrews broke down on the side of the road because fire engines accompanying the big man in red sounded their sirens too long.
All he could hear was the sounds of LynnMall on September 3 last year.
"There were sirens, there were helicopters. I can tell you exactly what an ambulance door sounds like when it opens and closes, the sound of a trolley coming in and out. I sat there with the kids with Santa coming along … and the sirens just went for too long.
"That's when I started needing more help."
Trauma has entered the home too.
His sons, aged 4 and 5, begged him to stop helping investigations into the incident, which ended with police shooting Samsudeen dead, because their dad couldn't talk about what happened without crying.
And his wife still talks about confusing initial feelings that left her unsure whether she was angry or proud of his actions because, when he turned around, he'd "risked everything".
He understands - he was angry at himself, too. But for all its anguish, the 46-year-old wouldn't change his decision.
"If I'd kept walking, I wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Tissues close, he's speaking to the Weekend Herald about what happened when he and other shoppers confronted an armed man - who'd once boasted online about wanting to "fill the enemies with stabbing, and cut off their heads violently" - because he wants people to know the impact went far beyond the eight official victims of Samsudeen's rampage.
"[I want to change] that Kiwi culture of bottling it up, not talking about it … I'm pretty good at crying these days, it seems to work."
He'd already learned no one's immune from trauma's impact, says Andrews, who spoke with Johns, now a friend, at his side.
"The vulnerability I saw from the police that day I'll never forget. To see officers openly crying under masks - yeah they were doing their job, but they'd never seen anything like that.
"This was just meant to be a Friday afternoon."
Officially, Andrews is a victim of Samsudeen.
Police had told him supermarket CCTV footage showed the 32-year-old's knife came so close to Andrews the terrorist could've been charged over it had he lived, Andrews says.
After running back into the supermarket to help, Andrews - hearing people yelling for Samsudeen to "put the knife down" - grabbed a queue control bollard before finding the terrorist trying to behead Johns near the milk cabinets.
"There were two really distinct movements. It was like he was a toddler with a paintbrush on an easel.
"He was really nonchalant, just seeing what was happening, and then he got real serious and he started, he was …", Andrews says, breaking down as remembers Samsudeen trying to behead the preschool teacher.
Hearing the terrorist's chants of "Allahu Akbar", Andrews shouted back, "Your God doesn't condone this," drawing Samsudeen's attention.
"He just charged me. Don't ever buy into what you see in the movies, eh? Because I had a pole with a big steel base and, in the movies, you can swing that stuff really easily. And in the time it took me to lift and swing it he was at me with the knife … inches away.
"I now have a better idea what a knife looks like when it's in front of me. I didn't used to appreciate how dangerous those things are. It moves so fast, because it's just an extension of your hand, it doesn't weigh anything."
He was saved when another shopper, former paramedic Ross Tomlinson yelled, 'F*** your God', turning Samsudeen's focus to a new target.
The two men, joined by two more - one in a face mask "with a big smiley face on it" - eventually surrounded Samsudeen in the beauty aisle.
"There were four Aucklanders of different nationalities who stood up to evil … if we hadn't slowed him down he would've done a lot more damage."
Seconds later Andrews heard "really loud, 'police, get down'", followed by - that he heard - four gunshots.
"I just hit the dirt."
Samsudeen was shot dead by police from the Special Tactics Group, who had him under 24/7 surveillance since he'd been released from prison seven weeks earlier, and been deemed a terrorist threat after several years of concerning behaviour, including posting graphic acts of war violence and support for Islamic State on Facebook.
A Tamil Muslim refugee from Sri Lanka whose radicalisation was so concerning Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern knew his name, was fighting the latest of many attempts to deport him at the time of his death.
The terrorist was shot "within roughly 60 seconds" of the attack beginning, Ardern told media later that day.
"If you watch the footage, it is short", Andrews says.
"But I can tell you, for me, it took hours."
Seconds earlier, Samsudeen had been Andrews' sole focus.
But that was over now.
"He wasn't getting up, and I just turned around and there were two people injured."
One was making a lot of noise, the other - Johns - was "really, really still".
"I was like, 'Okay [the other woman] is making lots of noise, so she's got air in her lungs. So I need to check you first'", he tells Johns during the Weekend Herald interview.
"And I saw that you were crying, and I said I needed to have a look - you were hanging on to your neck."
His voice drops to a whisper.
"And [the wound], it was massive."
After taking off his T-shirt and pressing it into Johns' neck wound, the pair locked eyes.
"I said, 'We're going to have a birthday party together. Stay with me, you're not quitting, you're not leaving.
"I knew you couldn't speak, I just needed to tell you that you had a reason to stick around, and whether it be my birthday or your birthday - we were having a party."
Johns, who spoke to the Weekend Herald about the attack in February, describing how she pretended to be dead when Samsudeen returned to attack her a second time, most remembers her rescuer's eyes.
The last she'd seen were her attacker's, which showed "no feeling, no remorse".
This was different.
"Blue. And I just remember him talking to me, and looking, looking."
As well as slicing twice across her neck and lower cheek, Samsudeen, wielding a knife from the supermarket's own shelves, stabbed Johns under her ribs, in her arm and twice in her side, the latter leaving her intestines protruding from the wounds.
Using clotting agents from the first police officers on scene and nappies grabbed by other helpers, they all tried to help, Andrews says.
"I remember you holding your side. This young female police officer came and said, 'What are we going to do?' and Ross said, 'We've to roll her and check', and we made such a mess of you, your um, just everything came out.
"And this young police officer just sort of held it and looked at you and said, 'It's okay', and then looked up at us and was just … "
The memories are there. But sometimes the words can't come out.
As more help arrived, Andrews - bare-chested, covered in blood and worrying aloud about his young sons waiting in the car during a terror attack he didn't know the full scope of - felt a hand on his shoulder.
"They just said, 'Go find your kids'. I remember getting out from there and just watching all these people working on [Johns], and [Samsudeen] was right there and I just didn't see him. I didn't care."
Andrews never made it to his kids - police stopped him, looking after the children as he was interviewed in the by-then closed mall's food court.
It was hours before he was home to Titirangi, and days before he knew if the young woman he'd comforted was going to make it.
Johns would spend almost a month in hospital, the first two weeks unconscious as she underwent surgeries and was heavily medicated to battle infections.
Words from a friend in Search and Rescue gave comfort in the early days, Andrews says.
"He said, 'You've just got to embrace the fact she wasn't alone. You got her off the floor and in front of her family, and if anything went wrong she still had time with her family'.
"That helped a lot."
However, guilt that he "could've done more" still plagued him.
"I struggle with the fact I ran backwards [when confronted by Samsudeen]. People have told me that's fight, not flight - it's self-preservation, otherwise neither of us would be here."
Johns, though, says "everything happened the way it should have".
"I think he did all that he should have. If he'd charged him he could've been hurt. And he was the one who came [afterwards] to check if I was okay . . . I was literally pretending to be dead.
"Would anyone else have [checked me] that quickly if he'd gotten hurt? I don't know. But, for me, he's a hero."
Theirs is a bond that now goes far beyond the fact both were in the supermarket that day to buy ingredients for Friday night lockdown fakeaways - Johns' tacos and Andrews' pizza.
Although it made him angry Samsudeen "didn't pick on anybody who could fight back" he, like Johns, didn't hate their attacker, Andrews says.
"I don't blame him. I feel that he was a very mentally unstable man and he was weaponised for somebody else's goals."
Both have met other survivors, among them four others stabbed by Samsudeen and a man who hurled tuna cans at the terrorist - now nick-named The Tuna Can Man by his daughter.
They've also had some of their trauma healed by a visit to Avondale Islamic Centre.
"To invite victims of the extreme end of their faith to their place of worship, with probably a massive fear of rejection and anger, it took courage", Andrews says.
And both still sometimes fear going to the supermarket, with Johns looking for hiding places and exits as she enters.
Recent stabbing incidents on the North Shore and at Henderson Mall haven't helped, says Avondale-based Johns, who moved to New Zealand from South Africa in 2019 so she and husband, Storm, could one day raise a family in a safer country.
"All the stuff that's happened since - the knife attacks - that's made it worse for me."
But they also know their triumph of survival means there'll continue to be more reasons to be grateful, Johns asks specifically to "thank Auckland for all the support", and new memories to make.
Last night came the first, a dress-up party for her 30th birthday.
At the top of her guest list was Andrews, 11 months after a moment of terror became one of tenderness on a cold supermarket floor.
Her birthday's actually next month, Johns says.
The party was early because on Wednesday she's having surgery to heal scar tissue, including one stretching from her belly to her chest.
So much has been delayed by the actions of one man, plans to buy their first home were shelved after Johns had to go on ACC for several months, along with hopes to start a family.
Wednesday's surgery will make it possible for Johns to safely carry a pregnancy.
Amid all the trauma and unresolved emotions from September last year, hearing the reason for Johns' surgery is "like Christmas", Andrews says.
"Oh, this is awesome. Through all this pure evil, they wanna bring a kid into the world. Yes!"
* Donations towards Johns' ongoing recovery can be made at https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/helping-to-support-the-youngest-victim
More than two dozen firefighters battled the fire at its peak.