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If I panic I die

It was an ordinary Monday morning when Stephen went to a café to have a meeting with his boss. He was told he was about to receive good news. Nothing could have prepared him for what actually happened. One minute he was idly people-watching – the next he was fighting for his life, the victim of a brutal knife attack.

Stephen (not his real name) has never told the story of this horrific crime in public before, but he believes sharing it with Dr Sian Williams on Radio 4's Life Changing will help him and others too.

The horrific attack on Stephen has left him scarred and scared, but he finds a way to process that day and start again. Listen now.

This article includes details which some readers may find distressing.

Stephen’s extraordinary story starts routinely enough. Recently married and with a small child, he was putting in the hours to provide his family with the highest standard of living he could. So, when his boss, looking a little stressed, suggested a coffee before work one bright Monday morning, Stephen had no reason to necessarily suspect that anything was wrong – in fact his boss said he had some good news for him.

When they settled themselves in the café, Stephen’s boss said he had to use the toilet and left Stephen to people-watch. He noticed two women excitedly having a video call with a friend. “One of them had a beautiful headscarf on. It was black in colour with these beautiful emerald, green colours on it. I remember that quite vividly.”

“I went to pick up my coffee,” remembers Stephen, “I took a drink and I thought, ‘What on earth is that? I've spilt coffee down myself.’ So as I looked down, all I could see was a sea of red.” Stephen’s eye caught those of the lady with the scarf, “her face looked like the famous painting The Scream.”

Realising the coffee spill was his blood, Stephen pushed himself back in his chair and then felt what he thought was someone punching him in the back and then in the head.

Somehow he manged to stand up.

“It was sheer panic everywhere in the coffee shop. Everybody was running and screaming, and I turned around and then I saw who it was...it was my boss standing there with this knife.”

Stephen pushed his boss, motionless and pale, back and then he collapsed on the floor. In the space of a few minutes, Stephen had received 14 stab wounds, one of which cut his throat, grazing his jugular but missing his windpipe, others to his back, neck and face.

“As I'm lying on the floor. I knew one thing, and that was if I panic, I die.”

Two male customers from the café came to help. “One of them said it was very surreal because there was only three people calm in that shop and that was myself, the attacker and himself.”

Stephen’s heroic calm enabled the two men to save his life.

The wording of the [not guilty] verdict was and still is really hard to comprehend.
Stephen

“I was lying on my back on the floor and I could feel the blood gushing out of it, and I was holding my intestines in on the left-hand side. I took control of the situation and let them know what I needed. I wasn't going to die in a coffee shop.”

The two men applied pressure under direction from Stephen. Meanwhile, he was also instructing a woman behind the counter who had the emergency services on the line.

Aware he was losing consciousness, Stephen wanted to get a message to his family via one of the men helping him. “He's like, ‘No, I don't want to hear that message. You'll make it!’ I said ‘No, no, I need you to pass the message back. I need you to tell my son that I love him!’”

When the paramedics arrived, they took over from the two men and administered morphine. Stephen was put into an ambulance and the driver told him he could close his eyes. “I just replied with, ‘I can't, not yet. I can't be D.O.A.’ There's no way on earth I was going to let that happen. Not after what I've gone through.”

Stephen stayed conscious until he was given an MRI scan. “My body physically gave up. I thought, I've done everything I possibly can, and that was it.”

He tells Sian that the one thing that pulled him through was his vow that, after having grown up without a dad, he would be there for any child of his “come hell or high water.”

When Stephen came round in the recovery suite, he had breathing tubes and chest drains fitted. He’d been given 14 pints of blood and had 76 metal staples across his body, and 70 stitches across his face and throat. His first words were: “He could have just sacked me!”

The gallows humour was a brief respite from a hard road ahead. During a two-week hospital stay, Stephen started getting flashbacks – “I felt I could feel each one of the stab wounds opening again in slow motion.” – and was later diagnosed with PTSD.

The diagnosis was a “massive breakthrough” because Stephen was told that his memory “disengaging” was a normal reaction. “I can't control it, but I can start to take steps to do that.”

Another challenge to Stephen would be the fate of his former boss. After being pushed aside by one of the men in the café holding a chair, his ex-boss had simply walked out of the café. He gave himself up immediately he was challenged and was charged with attempted murder. In court, the man entered a plea of "not guilty by reason of insanity", the evidence suggesting that he’d stopped his medication which led to a breakdown. He was sent to a secure psychiatric hospital and would eventually be released after three years with some restrictions in place.

Stephen continues to turn the “not guilty” around in his head. “The wording of that verdict was and still is really hard to comprehend.”

Now the father of two children, Stephen and his family have left the city for the country. He has scars to remind him of what he went through, and this can sometimes be an issue in public when he senses the wary reactions of those around him.

“I live the memories every day,” Stephen says. “I'm going to be in pain probably for quite a good number of years yet to come, unfortunately. But the massive positive is I've had a big reset button pressed for me. No doubt we would have been still trying to get the bigger house, bigger car, hardly seeing our children growing up…what this has done is taught us to appreciate every day. My message to everybody is don't let it take that long.”

"The massive positive is... this has taught us to appreciate every day."

Stephen reflects on the attack's outcomes for himself, his family and those who helped.

Further listening and information on Radio 4