Luke James Lambert spoke repeatedly about 'witches' in the aftermath of the bloody incident. Photo / Christine O'Connor
Luke James Lambert spoke repeatedly about 'witches' in the aftermath of the bloody incident. Photo / Christine O'Connor
It has been nearly a year since a transient Dunedin man entered a supermarket and tried to murder four people. Rob Kidd examines the forlorn hunt for answers and asks how such a catastrophic attack can be avoided in future.
When the walls of Luke Lambert's dank Shag Point home bloomed with mould, he covered them with Gib board.
It was enough to solve the problem temporarily.
A Band-Aid on a gaping wound.
But, of course, all the 43-year-old was doing was allowing that damp to fester, to permeate the dwelling.
This was at least a decade before Lambert embarked on a senseless stabbing spree at a Dunedin supermarket, years before his life truly entered freefall.
Even then he was a man of bizarre contradictions.
Greg Stevenson-Wright met Lambert at East Otago High School a couple of years after Lambert's parents had split up and he had moved to Waikouaiti with his mother and sister.
The pair played cricket and rugby together, went swimming at the beach, fishing, and camping at Karitane.
"He was pretty much your average awkward schoolboy," Stevenson-Wright recalled.
But by the time Lambert moved to the leasehold property at Shag Point with his two dogs, he fell into depression.
After failing to finish studies in electrical engineering and computer science, he instead opted for a less conventional life of hermithood.
Luke James Lambert spoke repeatedly about 'witches' in the aftermath of the bloody incident. Photo / Christine O'Connor
Stevenson-Wright said Lambert would order herbal supplements online, convinced they would improve his health, but would live in squalor.
On one visit to deliver groceries he saw an old chicken carcass on a table with mice feasting on it.
At Lambert's sentencing before the High Court at Dunedin this week, when he was jailed for 13 years, Justice Jonathan Eaton traced the man's history.
Like everyone, he sifted through the shards of a life seeking an answer as to why, but conceded it would only be an exploration, rather than an explanation.
Luke James Lambert sentenced in the High Court at Dunedin on Tuesday. Photo / Gregor Richardson
In December 2012, Lambert saw a GP after a self-harm attempt, describing panic attacks and feelings of despair.
While unable to find evidence of psychosis, the doctor noted a preoccupation with poisons, pesticides, political systems and local Nazis.
Stevenson-Wright was unimpressed with his mate's decision to buy a "shitty camper van", rusted through the chassis, and after a spell travelling around small Otago towns the vehicle broke down.
Next, Lambert used his late mother's car, settling in Dunedin and sleeping in it near Moana Pool.
Stevenson-Wright would occasionally give Lambert money and oil for the vehicle and while the situation was not ideal, there was no hint as to any bubbling inner turmoil.
But things were not as they seemed.
Just months before the incident, Lambert was playing cricket with Stevenson-Wright's Green Island fourth-grade cricket team.
"He was going to the library every day, doing weights and becoming more social," his friend said.
Stevenson-Wright, though, remained concerned about Lambert's drinking and suggested avenues through which the man could get help, none of which he took up.
Just two months before the Countdown incident, Lambert "lost the plot" when he kicked a car in town.
He was prosecuted for wilful damage — which added to a spare criminal record devoid of violence — and later said he had considered seeking help at Wakari Hospital.
"Unfortunately that didn't eventuate," Justice Eaton said.
Lambert's circumstances only became more strained.
Ambulance staff rush a victim to a waiting ambulance at the Countdown store in central Dunedin. Photo / ODT
He crashed his car and began sleeping rough under a tarpaulin in the wooded Town Belt.
Lambert later said he was consuming hemlock and did not care it was a poison because he believed it was "helping him cope".
"During that time you became particularly resentful of food prices and the capitalist nature of New Zealand," the judge said.
Was that part of the reason for the extreme violence on May 10 last year? A violent protest against a bastion of capitalism?
Stevenson-Wright was as stumped as the sentencing judge.
Perhaps it was the embarrassment of being mocked by schoolboys who saw him bedding down in the central Dunedin bush, the unaddressed grief over his mother and pets, maybe it was the shame of having to constantly ask his mate for money — or was it simply that he was frustrated he did not have enough cash for a beer?
Lambert mentioned witches to police and nurses who dealt with him in the aftermath, claiming they had told him to "make a bloodbath".
"All work and no play, on a massacre today," he told one constable.
Lambert admitted to psychologists in the months following that he dreamed of zombies and witches, but he denied having hallucinations.
At some stages he claimed to have no memory of his crimes.
One clinician believed he had serious personality dysfunction with "hints of an inner life which probably includes compensatory violent fantasies, misogyny and a strong sense of injustice".
Whatever was behind the outburst, Stevenson-Wright said Lambert must have been under "extreme stress".
"In 20-something years I've never seen him get angry," he said.
"I've seen him get punched in the face and just smile. He's just not that sort of person."
Frenzy
When he walked into Countdown Dunedin Central on the afternoon of the attack, Lambert was not tentative; he was deliberate and cold and he tried to kill four people whom he had never met.
The trouble with words is that they are sequential — one follows the next and they cannot overlap.
Words cannot do justice to the simultaneity of events that occurred over a frantic 90 seconds, the pure bedlam Lambert unleashed in the pharmacy aisle.
He could lay into the defenceless woman from behind, causing devastating injuries before she had chance to turn around.
But he does not.
Lambert grabs her shoulder, spins her slightly then slashes at her face.
He pushes her backwards, still face to face, then deliberately places a leg behind her, sending her tumbling and his momentum taking him down too.
As products from a display stand cascade across the floor, Lambert makes numerous attempts to stab the woman in the face while she parries the blows with her arms.
One of the store's senior managers Dallas Wilson runs in and drags the assailant off his colleague, allowing her to escape.
Police arrest Lambert outside the Countdown store. Photo / ODT
Meanwhile the first member of the public enters the fray, a slight, middle-aged woman who aims a blow at Lambert before being dragged away by another shopper.
As Wilson restrains the attacker from behind, Lambert is able to reach around and inflict several wounds to the man's midriff before breaking free.
Jorge Fuenzalida, a Corrections officer, rounds the corner and is almost immediately stabbed by Lambert and there is a sudden congestion of people at the top of the aisle, some there to intervene, others dashing for the exits.
Fuenzalida's wife, Vanessa Miller-Andrews, enters to briefly plead with Lambert but she, too, is stabbed within a split second.
The couple are attacked in tandem and there is a sudden and brief moment where people back off and the man appears to consider fleeing.
A female police officer on a day off enters the chaotic scene after hearing what she later described as "the type of screaming that makes your stomach sink".
"He had a knife in each hand at that point and I realised he was stabbing people. He was intentionally going for people's necks," her statement said.
The footage shows the terrifying mayhem which then unfolds.
Along with others she grabs Lambert from behind and bundles him to the floor as a detective constable on a late lunch break throws bottles of Ajax cleaning product at the man's head from near point-blank range.
Fuenzalida, tangled up in the melee, is hauled a few metres clear of Lambert, bleeding heavily, as people use a chair to pin down the writhing attacker.
When the male officer joins the efforts to restrain Lambert he slips in the blood and cleaning product which has now covered the floor.
More supermarket staff now enter the scene, using phones to call emergency services and applying first aid where they can.
Lambert remains pinned down but continues to struggle while an elderly woman approaches and uses her metal crutch to smash him several times in the legs until she is eventually pulled away.
As the threat of the knife-wielding man is neutralised, the precarious state of Fuenzalida's health is grotesquely apparent as the blood pool around him grows visibly larger with each second.
He would find out later that the blade was only millimetres away from causing him fatal injuries.
Meanwhile, Wilson walks through the carnage and only belatedly realises he too has been stabbed, lifting his jersey to reveal growing red patches on his sides.
Victim
The court this week heard of the immense physical pain the victims had endured and the debilitating psychological effects of going through such an ordeal.
Wilson, who did not read his statement in court, told the Otago Daily Times he was now working at a different supermarket and was at "about 70 or 80%" physically.
He realised Lambert had not targeted him specifically but it had still made him wary about working in a similar environment.
"It's pretty hard to sort of erase it, especially working in public," he said.
"I still watch my back."
The fact the attack was random had made it both easier to live with and harder to rationalise.
Wilson said that while Lambert had inflicted so much suffering on his victims it was difficult to truly hate him because he was "not of sound mind".
"I haven't really struggled with [the thought of] him so much because I didn't know him. He didn't come there to attack me as such. I got in his way, I suppose," he said.
"There's no motive other than he got a bit pissed off that he didn't get his beer — it's just so extreme."
While there were no obvious signs Lambert was going to go on such a rampage there had been many preceding instances of aggression by other customers, Wilson said.
So common were such flashpoints, he said, that when he heard his co-workers screams for help his immediate reaction was "What now?".
Safety
The Dunedin incident was followed by a similar knife attack at a New Lynn Countdown less than five months later.
Unlike Lambert, however, extremist Ahamed Samsudeen had given authorities significant cause for concern in the lead-up and was being followed by police who shot and killed him after he had injured eight people.
The twin incidents caused Countdown to increase its use of security contractors — two have been stationed at the Dunedin store during operating hours over the last year.
But the use of outside security staff has drawn criticism from First Union and supermarket workers.
Bella*, whose collective agreement prohibits her from speaking to media on the record, described them as "decoration".
"It's just a waste of time them being there. Most are too scared or too old to do anything anyway," she said.
"You have some that just come in and play on their phone the whole time."
Bella recently gave up a role in loss prevention at a North Island supermarket because of the stress but reducing her responsibilities had not afforded her any great comfort.
"I feel like I have to go to work every day staunch. I have to prepare for anything that may happen, just hoping that nothing too serious will prevent me coming home to my family," she said.
Bella also took aim at police who she believed did not respond to incidents of shoplifting, trespass and threatening behaviour with enough urgency.
Ultimately, she said, many of the issues within her store came down to understaffing.
First Union national retail and finance secretary Ben Peterson agreed it was the critical factor in turning things around.
He described a "worrying trend of customer aggression incidents across the board and across all companies".
Peterson acknowledged supermarkets had offered staff counselling and allowed them extra leave to come to terms with the violence of the Dunedin and New Lynn attacks, but he said there had been no fundamental change.
The solution, he said, was to bring supermarket security in-house, to have someone invested in improving the environment and safety of colleagues and customers.
What often happened was that senior managers, who already had a hefty workload, would shoulder the responsibility and incidents of aggression would often be overlooked because it involved yet more paperwork.
Of course, improving the situation would mean companies funding more workers.
"When you have more staff in stores they are able to move around and make sure people are supported," Peterson said.
With contract negotiations with Countdown on the horizon next month, he hoped the recent focus on these essential workers would give them some bargaining power.
If they reached a stalemate, Peterson said, there was "real appetite" for industrial action.
A Countdown spokeswoman said the company was unable to comment on details of its security measures.
"The safety and wellbeing of our team is extremely important to us and we are constantly reviewing all our health and safety measures to ensure we're doing everything we can to keep our team safe," she said.
