By Brendan Rees
Bridget O’Toole has tried to block out the painful memory the day her husband was tragically killed by two stab wounds to the upper chest.
“I’ve got to be kinder to myself because you torture yourself thinking could’ve done more,” says Mrs O’Toole. “Survivor guilt isn’t good.”
It was 5pm on 12 July 2013 when a man wielding a 20-centimetre carving knife entered Bridget and Dermot O’Toole’s jewellery store in Hastings.
“I thought it was a customer coming in and I just got up to serve him,” she said.
However Mrs O’Toole, of Lyndhurst, was attacked by the armed assailant who pushed her into a glass cabinet and stabbed her several times.
“He was screaming like a lunatic,” she recalled.
During the attack Mr O’Toole, who suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, came out from the workshop to defend his wife and began wrestling with the assailant.
“We were just trying to fight him off…Dermot was desperately trying to save me.”
“Dermot fell over, he tripped over and he turned on him and stabbed him to death,” she said.
Mrs O’Toole attempted to pull the offender away from her husband and in doing so she was further assaulted. The assailant then ran out of the shop.
Mr O’Toole, 64, was fatally wounded and tragically died at the scene.
Mrs O’Toole was taken to hospital where she had to undergo plastic surgery for the extensive serious stab and slash wounds and the glass shards that were embedded in her back.
For her actions, Mrs O’Toole was awarded the 2018 Gold Clarke Medal during a presentation at the Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday 23 August.
“It was a beautiful day,” says Mrs O’Toole. “I was totally humbled and to be deemed worthy of such a prestigious award I couldn’t believe it.”
The medal is an award of The Royal Humane Society of Australasia and is the Society’s highest award for the most outstanding case of bravery.
Mr O’Toole was posthumously awarded the Star of Courage in 2017 – Australia’s highest bravery accolades which recognises “acts of conspicuous courage in circumstances of great peril”.
The robber, Gavin Perry, 27, was high after taking ice and on parole at the time of the murder. He was jailed for 27 years in 2014 for the crime.
Mrs O’Toole remembers her husband of 41 years as a wonderful man who was a funny, kind and loyal man.“I had the best husband and we had a great life together,” she said. “Life has just been horrible since.”
