For many, Saturdays are something to look forward to – relaxed times, enjoyed with family and friends. But Elizabeth Young "dreads" them. It's a weekly reminder of her daughter Jade's violent murder at Westfield Bondi Junction.
"On a lovely autumn afternoon, to learn your daughter is dead, stabbed in broad daylight, killed amidst fellow unsuspecting shoppers… [when she] was living, breathing, just an hour ago… it's the stuff of nightmares, of a parallel universe," Elizabeth told an inquiry into the mass killing this week.
"The moment [the attacker] casually plunged that knife into Jade, our ordinary lives were shattered."
Her pain was echoed by families of the other victims who gave emotional testimonies on the final day of a five-week coronial inquest into the fatal stabbings on 13 April last year.
The inquiry sought to understand how a 40-year-old Queensland man with a long history of mental illness was able to walk into the popular Sydney shopping centre on a busy Saturday afternoon and kill six people, injuring 10 others including a nine-month-old baby.
The court heard hours of evidence from dozens of witnesses – doctors, survivors, victims' families, police – in a bid to find out how, or if, Australia can prevent a such a tragedy happening again.
"It seems to me that my daughter and five others were killed by the cumulative failures of numbers of people within a whole series of fallible systems," Elizabeth told New South Wales (NSW) Coroners Court.
Shopping centre stabbings shock nation
It was a mild, sparkling afternoon – the first day of school holidays – when Joel Cauchi walked into the sprawling shopping centre, just minutes from Australia's most famous beach.
Just before 15:33 local time, Cauchi took a 30cm knife from his backpack and stabbed to death his first victim, 25-year-old Dawn Singleton.
Within three minutes, he had fatally attacked five others – Yixuan Cheng, 27; Jade Young, 47, Ashlee Good, 38; Faraz Tahir, 30; and Pikria Darchia, 55. Cauchi also injured 10 others including Good's infant daughter.
At 15:38, five minutes after his rampage started, Cauchi was shot dead by police officer Amy Scott, who had been on duty nearby and arrived at the centre about a minute earlier.
As news outlets reported on the killings, Cauchi's parents recognised their son on TV and called the police to alert them about his decades-long struggle with serious mental health problems.
Jade Young's family was also confronted by images of her on TV, describing to the inquest the horror of seeing video which showed her "lifeless body being worked on". Similarly, Julie Singleton, whose daughter Dawn was killed while queueing at a bakery, heard her daughter named as a victim on the radio before her body had even been formally identified and other relatives informed.
The scenes at Bondi sent shockwaves across the nation, where mass murder is rare, and prompted a rush of anger and fear from women in particular. All except two of the 16 victims were female, including five of the six people who died.
