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A dance teacher who led the Taylor Swift-themed children’s workshop which was attacked in Southport has described feeling “tortured” by a “crushing” guilt over the atrocity.
Heidi Liddle, who shielded one little girl inside a bathroom during the attack, said the trauma of that day had “fractured every part of my brain and my life”.
In tearful testimony to the inquiry being held at Liverpool town hall, Liddle said: “Although people have told me this incident is not my fault, the guilt I bear is crushing. I feel responsible.
“I tried so hard to usher as many children out as possible, to get them away from him [the attacker]. I constantly replay what happened over and over in my mind, what I was able to do, what else could I have done, the what ifs.”
Her friend Leanne Lucas, with whom she led the workshop, said “survival instincts” had guided her decision to rush out of the building with children.
Lucas, 35, phoned 999 in the “absolute chaos” of trying to escape after Axel Rudakubana stabbed her five times, fracturing her shoulder blade and cutting off parts of her spine. She fell unconscious from her injuries after calling for help.
Occasionally breaking to stop her tears, the former primary school teacher said: “I acted in a way to find help as quickly as possible. Living with that knowledge is hard.”
Since the attack, Lucas said, she had felt “ostracised” in Southport, her home town, and felt exposed and criticised for her actions: “To some I am called a hero, to others a villain. The truth is, I am neither. I am just Leanne, the woman who did her best in an unthinkable situation.”
The attack had left her “excluded from parts of my own community”, she said, adding that she stayed away from events because her presence could distress the families of the children.
Lucas added: “I don’t heal alongside or within my community. I feel ostracised in the very town where I built my life.”
The inquiry, led by the former appeal court judge Sir Adrian Fulford, is examining the failures to prevent the killing of Bebe King, six; Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven; and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine; and the attempted murder of eight other girls and two adults on 29 July last year.
Liddle, who was returning to work from maternity leave at the time, described how she frantically tried to usher children to safety as Rudakubana rained down blows with a 20cm (8in) kitchen knife.
She saw Lucas being “brutally attacked” and ran with some of the girls to the stairway. One of the children, she noticed, had run in the opposite direction towards a toilet, so she quickly opened the door and locked them both inside.
“Whilst in the toilet, the perpetrator was banging and rattling the door attempting to get in – only stopping when the police arrived,” she said. “The girls’ screaming and fearing for our lives haunts me to this day.”
Through tears, the mother of two told the inquiry that she responded in a split second to the “most horrendous and terrifying situation I’ve ever been in, one I had never even imagined possible”.
She added: “My instinct was to protect all of the girls; despite this, a part of me always questions if we could have done anything differently in those moments of terror.”
Liddle said she felt her experience had been diminished during the police investigation as she was treated as a witness rather than a victim.
“Whilst I will always consider other people’ s experiences and feelings that day above my own, this labelling made me feel like my own experience was immaterial, trivial or even worthless,” she said.
The inquiry continues.
