They were killed in the London Bridge terror attack, seconds apart
Sara Zelenak was brutally unlucky. Her parents, Mark and Julie, can reel off all the different reasons why she shouldn’t have been walking down the pavement at the junction of London Bridge and Borough High Street 19 seconds after 10.07pm on 3 June 2017.
“She was never going to be in London,” Mark says, wide-eyed. “She was going to be an au pair in Milan.”
Ten days before she was supposed to leave her home in Brisbane, the job got cancelled. “But she was able to pick up something in London, so that’s where she went.”
Sara loved London: the fashion, the nightlife, even the cold.
She was 21 and the world was her oyster. “She came completely out of her shell,” Julie tells me. “You could see her change in three months. She blossomed.”
On that Saturday in June, Sara was meant to be at home in London’s Victoria, with the kids she au paired, Mark says. “But the grandma said, ‘I’m going to have the children tonight, so you can have the night off.’”
First, Sara planned to go to a rooftop bar in Soho with Priscila Gonçalves, a friend from her au pair WhatsApp group, but they couldn’t find it so they headed to London Grind, a buzzing place close to Borough Market, on London Bridge. Sara had made plans to go on a first date with a guy who was watching the Champions League final nearby; he said he’d call her once the match was over.
“It always plays on my mind,” Julie tells me. “If he had rung one minute later, she would have been one minute behind. She walked out into a terrorist attack.”
“There were so many sliding doors,” Mark says.
Sara stepped out of the bar moments after a white Renault Master van containing Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba made a U-turn at the northern end of London Bridge and sped back towards Borough High Street. Less than 10 minutes later, 11 people were dead and 48 had been seriously injured. The three terrorists had been shot and killed by armed police, at the end of a rampage in which eight people were murdered. Sara was their youngest victim.
I have spent four years investigating the prices put on human lives by criminals, judges, philanthropists, actuaries, policymakers and healthcare providers. I’ve seen how these sums can vary according to nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation and whether taxpayers, businesses or charitable foundations are footing the bill. And I discovered the price of Sara’s life turns out to be a small fraction of others killed in the same atrocity, by the same terrorists, only seconds before they killed her.
The evening of Saturday 3 June 2017 was warm and London Bridge was full of tourists. The white van, hired by Butt for £70 a few hours earlier, was weighed down with bags of gravel, with 13 wine-bottle molotov cocktails and blowtorches also in the back. Zaghba was behind the wheel as it hurtled along the bridge and mounted the pavement three times in 15 seconds. Holly Jones, a BBC journalist, had been crossing from south to north, and could see his face as he ploughed into people. “It was intentional what he was doing. He was angry, demented,” she told the inquest into the attacks.
The first time the van mounted the pavement, it struck and injured three people. The second time, it hit Xavier Thomas, 45, and Christine Delcros, 43, a French couple who had arrived in London that day and were taking a romantic walk before cocktails at the Shard. She was seriously injured but survived; he was knocked over the bridge’s granite balustrade – his body was recovered from the Thames two miles downstream three days later. Ten seconds after hitting Xavier and Christine, the van careened on to the pavement again, striking Chrissy Archibald, a 30-year-old Canadian who was walking with her fiance, Tyler Ferguson. Chrissy became trapped under the van’s chassis as it crossed the central reservation. When she came free, Zaghba ran her over. She died shortly afterwards, in Tyler’s arms.
The van then crashed against wrought-iron railings at the top of Borough High Street, next to the Barrowboy and Banker pub, a few paces from London Grind. It was seconds after Sara and Priscila had left the bar. Priscila later told the inquest they became separated in the chaos as people ran from the crash site. The three terrorists emerged from the wreckage dressed in what turned out to be fake suicide vests, with 12in pink ceramic knives they had bought from Lidl for £4.62 strapped to their wrists. They set upon Sara, stabbing her in the neck several times, from behind. She died at the top of the steps down to Green Dragon Court, her phone buzzing in her hand as Priscila tried to find her.
James McMullan, 32, who had stepped out of the Barrowboy and Banker for a cigarette, was the only British person killed by the terrorists. He was stabbed in the back; a witness told the inquest he may have been trying to help Sara after she slipped and fell in her heels. Alexandre Pigeard was a 26-year-old French waiter at the Boro Bistro in Green Dragon Court, below street level. A shower of rubble had fallen down into the courtyard following the crash and Alexandre had headed towards the stone stairs to see if he could help anyone, only to be stabbed in the neck at their base. Tracing a wall with his fingertips, he managed to make it back to Boro Bistro, but was pursued by the terrorists and stabbed again.
Sébastian Bélanger, a 36-year-old French chef who had been watching the football with friends in Borough Market, was killed in the dark archway close to Boro Bistro, and Kirsty Boden, a 28-year-old Australian nurse who was out with friends at the Bistro, was circled by the attackers and stabbed to death as she tried in vain to save Alexandre’s life.
The attackers then ran back up the steps and on to Borough High Street. Ignacio Echeverría, a 39-year-old banker originally from Spain, had spent the evening skateboarding with friends. They were cycling towards the river when he saw the terrorists attacking a police officer and a woman under the railway bridge. He threw down his bike and swung his skateboard at Redouane. Redouane stabbed him, and when Ignacio fell to the ground, Zaghba joined in the assault. His was the last life taken by the terrorists.
The best and worst of humanity was on display in those frenzied 10 minutes. Ignacio and Kirsty gave their lives trying to save others. British Transport police officer Wayne Marques confronted the attackers armed only with his baton, and was stabbed in the eye, leg and hand. Off-duty Metropolitan police officer Charlie Guenigault ran to help PC Marques, and was also seriously injured. When the terrorists moved into Borough Market, Romanian baker Florin Morariu threw crates at them, then gave shelter to 20 people in his bakery. And when they began stabbing diners at the Black and Blue steakhouse, 47-year-old Roy Larner attacked them with his bare fists, shouting, “Fuck you, I’m Millwall.” He was stabbed in the neck, back and chest, but survived.
Armed officers from the City of London police and the Met fired a total of 46 rounds at Butt, Zaghba and Redouane on Stoney Street. They were shot dead eight minutes after the first emergency call was made.
Perhaps mercifully, there is no CCTV of the attack on Sara. “They assume Sara slipped in her high heels,” Julie frowns. “She could do a backflip on a tightrope in heels.” When her parents heard that at the inquest, they bristled. “It made her out to be a blond bimbo, and that annoyed me. People have no idea what she was like.”
Julie and Mark are speaking to me from K’gari (also known as Fraser Island), off the east coast of Australia, where they moved a few months ago to look after three holiday homes.
“She was very streetwise,” Julie says. “She was always looking after everyone else.” Sara was athletic and adventurous: she loved basketball and had done avalanche survival training in Canada. She left school at 18 and worked alongside Mark for a while as a crane operator, wearing fake nails along with her hard hat. Mark was Sara’s stepfather, but he brought her up from 18 months and calls her his daughter. He worked in drilling and Julie was a personal trainer; they were both self-employed and worked odd hours, so Sara would often look after her older and younger brothers.
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