A second specialist paramedic has denied being reluctant to continue to the scene of the mass shooting at Linwood Islamic Centre on the day of the Christchurch terror attack.
An inquest into the attacks already heard a vehicle carrying police and two specialist St John paramedics stopped for more than six minutes on the way to the Linwood Avenue mosque on March 15 2019.
An Australian police officer told the Coroner that he and an Auckland-based Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) member spent most of that time trying to convince the Special Emergency Response Team (Sert) paramedics to keep driving, because they were reluctant to go.
One of the paramedics, Karen Jackson, today told the inquest she disagreed with the Australian officer’s recollection of events.
She said she spent most of the six minutes out of the vehicle, putting on her ballistic equipment and speaking to a woman who wanted to go to the mosque because her husband and baby were there.
“There was no reluctance or refusal, or I don’t actually recall any discussions to that point,” she said.
“Both of us needed to get our equipment on, which we did, and we were approached by a woman and that took some dialogue both with me and the police speaking to her.
“But in that time, I don’t recall any further urging. I just recall being told we can proceed to the mosque.”
Jackson told counsel for families and victims Nikki Pender no time was wasted on the stop and the decision was “very wise”.
“There’s no way it would have been safe for us to proceed without our equipment on. It would have been foolish for us to go straight into a scene which could be a scene of live fire.”
Nikki Pender, counsel for some of the mosque attack victims' families, in court. Photo / pool
Once she got back into the vehicle, Jackson said her Sert colleague Dale Muller told her they could continue to the mosque, and she started driving.
She told the court she assumed either Muller or one of the police officers had asked if it was safe to go to the scene over the police radio, or they had heard it over the radio.
The inquest earlier heard there were no outbound radio transmissions from the vehicle.
Muller also denied to the court that he and Jackson needed to be persuaded to continue on to the scene. He said the stop was his idea and “no-one disagreed”.
The Auckland-based AOS member also told the court the decision for Sert to pull over was a “necessary and sensible course of action”.
Once inside the mosque, Jackson said she was tasked with helping a patient who was given IV fluids and later taken to hospital by ambulance.
She told the court it was her impression that police who arrived at the scene before her had done “life-saving work” to control major bleeding.
Jackson said ideally more ambulances would have been at the mosque, so each patient had someone looking after them on the way to hospital, but there were plenty of medically-trained people involved and police helped with transport.
She told the court she never received a briefing from police about what they were going to encounter in Linwood, which was unlike any other job.
The inquest will examine the following 10 issues over six weeks:
events of 15 March 2019 from the commencement of the attack until the terrorist’s formal interview by police
response times and entry processes of police and ambulance officers at each mosque
triage and medical response at each mosque
the steps that were taken to apprehend the offender
the role of, and processes undertaken by, Christchurch Hospital in responding to the attack
coordination between emergency services and first responders
whether the terrorist had any direct assistance from any other person on 15 March 2019
if raised by immediate family, and to the extent it can be ascertained, the final movements and time of death for each of the deceased
the cause of death for each of the victims and whether any deaths could have been avoided
whether Al Noor Mosque emergency exit door in the southeast corner of the main prayer room failed to function during the attack and, if so, why?
