A new mother was forced to throw her bleeding baby into a stranger’s arms as she tried to escape a rampaging knifeman who murdered her and five others in a Sydney shopping centre on Saturday before being shot dead.
Dr Ash Good, a 38-year-old osteopath, was strolling through Westfield shopping centre in Bondi with her nine-month-old daughter when the attacker, who has not been named, started to stab people.
The man attacked Good’s daughter in her pram before turning his knife on the mother, the Australian Telegraph reported.
Suffering from multiple stab wounds, Good focused on saving her only child’s life by giving her to bystanders.
Good, described as a “beautiful, beautiful girl”, died from her wounds soon after arriving at St Vincent’s Hospital. Her daughter is undergoing surgery for stomach wounds.
“[Good] handed us the baby and said ‘please help, help’,” one of two brothers at the scene told Channel Nine. “She was bleeding from her head, her face … the baby was bleeding.”
“I was just holding the baby and trying to compress the baby. Same with the mother, [I was] trying to compress the [bleeding],” he told Nine News. “It looked pretty bad.”
“We just kept yelling out to get some clothes to help us compress and stop the baby bleeding,” the other brother said.
The man said he used shirts to try to staunch the flow of blood. “The mother, unfortunately, she started to have a lot of blood come from her mouth.”
Andy Reid, a Bondi lifeguard, immediately went into rescue mode and ran down an escalator to help Good.
“I just saw this empty pram. I’ve got three young kids and I just thought, ‘Oh my God’,” he said.
He also tried to do compressions and was soon joined by paramedics.
It was reported that Good took refuge with her baby and several others in a Tommy Hilfiger store, with staff locking the doors behind them while the knifeman continued his rampage.
Mr Reid said he had witnessed some “pretty gnarly stuff” during his 20 years as a lifeguard, but “nothing like” the “cowardly attack” at the shopping centre.
“It was carnage,” another witness said, as he described how the man started suddenly “stabbing people indiscriminately”.
Good had recently returned to work after maternity leave.
Earlier on Saturday she had posted a video to her Instagram of her nine-month-old baby smiling and eating a snack in her car seat to the soundtrack of My Girl by The Temptations.
She had posted on LinkedIn a month ago how much she loved being a new mother.
“It’s not lost on me what a privilege it is to become a parent. And then to be gifted some extra time away from work to spend with your child … it’s very special.”
Her father, Kerry Good, is a former Australian Rules footballing great who played for North Melbourne in the VFL from the late 1970s.
Laura Jayes, a presenter on Australia’s Sky News reporting from the scene, paid a tribute to her friend live on air.
“She was so smart. She was an athlete, she was clever and then she found the love of her life and had a baby late in life and that was her miracle baby,” she said.
Miracle baby
“A mother would never hand over her baby unless she had to and these were desperate, desperate times. And there you have it,” she said.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb told a press conference: “The last update I had was that [the baby] had been in surgery and it’s too early to say really. But it’s awful.”
The killing spree in the packed and hugely popular mall close to the famous Bondi beach left five women and a man dead and eight injured.
Police have ruled out terrorism as a motive if the suspect is formally identified as the 40-year-old man they believe him to be.
“He is known to law enforcement but we are waiting to…
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