As a knife-wielding terrorist wearing a fake suicide belt caused panic on London Bridge in 2019, Darryn Frost remembers entering a state of intense focus.
Having grabbed a decorative narwhal tusk from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall, the formerly shy civil servant zoned in on the danger and ran towards it, helping pin the attacker to the ground.
It is unclear why Frost went from bystander to “have-a-go hero”, much like Ahmed al-Ahmed, who wrestled a gun off one of the attackers on Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday.
For Frost, 44, the answer is neither simple nor instinctive. He has spoken to Steven Gallant, who was on day release from prison when he used a chair to help bring down the attacker, Usman Khan, who had killed two people. “He said he reacted on instinct, whereas I was thinking about every action and consequence of it,” Frost said.
When the London Bridge attack unfolded inside the hall on 29 November 2019, Frost said chaos and confusion took hold. “There was screaming, noise, no one knew what was going on and I imagine it would have been the same on Bondi Beach.”
Running towards danger, he insisted, was not a natural impulse. “I don’t think it comes naturally to anyone. I saw Saskia [Jones, who was killed by the attacker] fall to the stairs, and she was very clearly severely injured. So the next thought in my mind was: ‘I need to prevent that from happening to anyone else’.”
He said what followed felt unreal: “It’s crazy, but this was all happening in split seconds. It really is like the Superman or Spider-Man movies, or the Matrix, where time literally slows down for you.”
He said his senses narrowed to a single point: the attacker. “I had tunnel vision,” he recalled. “My hearing switched off to everything around me except for the perpetrator in front of me. It’s a really strange thing. Sirens, alarms were going off, I couldn’t even hear that. All I could hear was what he was saying and anything that he did, my hearing just became super fine-tuned.
“My vision went tunnel vision just on to him so anything in the periphery I couldn’t see at all, and what I could see was super-high detail like an 8K TV. I can still remember the flecks of dust in the air.”
A neuroscientist, Dr Daniel Glaser, said humans, like all mammals, exhibit a natural “fight or flight” response to threat or surprise, but it does not dictate the course of action they choose.
“It prepares your muscles, and to some extent your brain, for action, but the action that you take depends on a bunch of other things,” he said.
“How you perceive what’s happening changes what you’ll do, and your perceptions are driven by prejudice and expectations. Your sense of what’s happening depends on what you expect to be happening and how you read different situations.
“You shouldn’t necessarily think about it as a choice. There’s very good evidence to say that lots of things in the brain which determine your behaviour happen before you’re aware of them.”
He said the kind of bravery that caused people to run towards danger while others were running away was guided not by “instinct”, but by life experiences and any training they may have had.
Earlier this week, Dan Barr, a former soldier, was hailed as a hero for jumping into the car of Paul Doyle, who drove into crowds of pedestrians at the Liverpool FC parade.
Prof Craig Jackson, a chartered member of the British Psychological Society, who has a specialist interest in gun violence and mass killings, said there was no “profile” of the kind of person who would “have a go”.
“It’s just as likely to be an angry mum in defence mode as it could be a fit, healthy rugby-playing male,” said the professor of workplace health psychology at Birmingham City University. “That’s reassuring because that means that attackers, either lone wolves or terrorists, they’re never quite sure who’s going to be the hero who could challenge them.”
During the London Bridge attack in 2017 Roy Larner, 56, a football fan, was stabbed in his hands, chest and head as he tried to fight off three knife-wielding terrorists with his fists.
“Fuck you, I’m Millwall,” he shouted after Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba burst into the Black and Blue steakhouse.
“They’d come in and kicked the door open, and that’s when the three of them started stabbing me. I started fighting back with them, but it gave that 20 or 30 people a chance to get out in front of me. It nearly cost me my life,” he recalled.
“I was fighting for my life. Punching and punching and punching. [I was stabbed] eight times and slashed in the head as well. They were slicing me, stabbing me. I broke my ribs when I went back into the table. But luckily – my arm’s a bit weak still – but nothing major. It’s only the trauma side of it that really hurt me.”
Larner, who was hailed the “Lion of London Bridge”, said he made a split-second decision to intervene.
“You should run. [But] you can be an idiot and take three on,” he said. “There was an older bloke with us, about 78, and I think that was the reason why I stood there. But obviously it gave other people a chance to get out as well.”
Larner, who lives in Peckham, south London, was not formally recognised for his bravery and did not receive compensation for his injuries. He said it was because he had convictions, including for racially aggravated common assault.
Despite this, he said he would not hesitate to intervene again. “I’ve never had any boxing training or anything like that. [But] I’ve done something good. Whether that makes up for the bad things I’ve done, who knows?”
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