An anaesthetist nurse on a shopping trip stabbed the owner of a Northallerton vinyl record shop with a syringe needle loaded with a lung-stopping drug in a bid to kill him, a court heard.
The “completely unprovoked” attack by vinyl record enthusiast Darren Harris, 58, left shop owner Gary Lewis unconscious, fitting on the ground and unable to breathe outside his record shop in Northallerton after he went into respiratory arrest.
Harris, who at the time worked at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, was browsing inside victim Mr Lewis’s Betterdaze Record Shop & Juke Box Showroom in Zetland Street before going back to his car, taking out a syringe loaded with a clinical muscle relaxant and returning to the record store where Mr Lewis was sat behind the counter, a jury at Leeds Crown Court heard.
Harris walked up to the counter as if he were about to buy a record, but then without warning plunged the hypodermic needle into Mr Lewis’s buttock.
Prosecutor Richard Herrmann said it was a “completely unprovoked, indiscriminate attack of extreme violence by a complete stranger in broad daylight” which occurred “out of nowhere”.
He added: “The attack rendered the victim completely paralysed and unable to communicate in any way with those who were trying to save him”, even though he could “hear and understand everything that was going on around him up until the point that he lost consciousness.”
Harris, of Amesbury Crescent, Middlesbrough, was charged with attempted murder but denies the allegation.
He also denies an alternative charge of causing grievous bodily harm with intent but has admitted a third charge of administering a noxious substance thereby causing really serious harm or endangering life.
He appeared for trial today to face trial on the attempted murder and GBH allegations, which he has denied claiming lack of intent.
The horrific and bizarre attack occurred on July 2 last year on what was “in all other regards a perfectly normal day in the life of Gary Lewis”.
“At 10am, shortly after he opened up the shop, the defendant drove his car along Zetland Street down an alleyway to the side of the shop, parked up and walked into the shop,” said Mr Herrmann.
“Darren Harris was a regular vinyl enthusiast and customer who went on to spend a considerable amount of time browsing the records in the shop. To Gary Lewis’s mind, Darren Harris was a complete stranger, someone he didn’t recall ever having set eyes on before.
“The defendant was in and out of the shop throughout the course of the late morning until he entered a final time at around 2.15pm. A little over five minutes later, the defendant went towards Gary Lewis who was sitting in his desk chair in a tight space behind the counter.”
As Harris approached the counter, Mr Lewis, who is in his 60s, “swivelled away from the defendant to put the cash in the till or money box”.
“The defendant, suddenly and without warning, reached forwards and stabbed Gary Lewis in the buttock with a hypodermic needle, injecting him with a (muscle-relaxant) drug,” said Mr Herrmann.
“The defendant immediately scurried out of the shop, going into his car to drive off.”
However, his path was blocked by members of the public and Mr Lewis himself, who was still mobile and seemingly unscathed at this stage as the drug had not yet taken effect.
Mr Lewis had run out of his store, picked up a shop sign from a neighbouring business and placed it at the entrance to the alleyway to block Harris’s path.
“It is a matter of great good fortune that the effects of the drug were delayed so that Gary Lewis was able to pursue the defendant out of his otherwise empty shop, call for help and tell others what had happened,” added Mr Herrmann.
“Had he not been able to get out of the shop and call for help, it’s highly probable that he would have died alone in his shop, behind the counter, in all likelihood with it being put down to natural causes.”
Within a matter of minutes, Mr Lewis’s condition “rapidly and seriously deteriorated”, he stopped breathing and fell unconscious as members of the public – including his good friend and business partner, who runs Yesterdaze vintage and antiques, the next-door sister shop to Betterdaze – rushed to his aid.
She tended to Mr Lewis who was placed on a chair outside the shop, but then he collapsed onto the pavement.
She rang 999 and made a desperate call for help to an ambulance operator as an unresponsive Mr Lewis started fitting on the ground.
Harrowing CCTV footage of the unfolding scenes showed the woman, who was named in court, telling the operator: “He’s going grey. His pulse is getting weaker.”
Police and an ambulance crew arrived at the scene and paramedics carried out cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on Mr Lewis.
The woman told officers that Harris had been “in and out (of the shop) all morning” and said he was a cardiothoracic nurse.
Harris, who had been prevented from driving off, was standing just a few metres away, apparently unconcerned as the dreadful scenes unfolded in the shopping street.
When, with “increasing panic and urgency”, a police officer asked him what he had injected into Mr Lewis, he “nonchalantly” replied: “Nothing.”
When he was asked about the syringe, he said it ‘didn’t have a needle and just contained water’.
“That was an egregious lie and it was a lie that could so easily have thwarted the attempts of the emergency services to save Gary Lewis’s life,” said Mr Herrmann.
It later emerged that Harris had used a specialist drug used in clinical anaesthesia as a skeletal-muscle relaxant.
It can induce muscle paralysis and is used alongside general anaesthetic to keep the body still during surgery and allow for mechanised functioning of the lungs.
Mr Herrmann told the jury: “You can be sure that the defendant knew all of that because he had worked as a specialist anaesthetist nurse at James Cook University Hospital at Teesside, had worked in the NHS from 1996, first as a porter, but as early as 2000 he had qualified as an operating practitioner and began working in operating theatres focusing on anaesthesia.
“Since 2017, he worked full time in the role of specialist anaesthetic practitioner in cardiothoracic theatres at the hospital (in Teesside).”
Mr Herrmann said it was the prosecution’s case that Harris had stolen the drug and the syringe from the hospital to enable him to “carry out his wicked plan”.
“The evidence shows he ended his final shift before this attack at around 7pm the day before, on July 1,” added the prosecuting barrister.
He said this suggested that Harris had formulated his plan to kill Mr Lewis at least 18 hours before the attack.
He said that Harris’s “vast experience of the clinical use of the drug” would have taught him that anyone injected with the muscle relaxant would be unable to breathe unaided.
Though Harris refused to tell police what he had injected into Mr Lewis, the consultant in charge of the victim’s care in the hospital’s ICU had an idea from the outset that Harris had used a clinical muscle relaxant.
Given this information, police asked Harris if he had knowledge of the intravenous drug and the effect it had on people, and he replied: “Yeah.”
He said that if the drug wasn’t “monitored correctly, it can stop them breathing” and “paralyse the muscles”.
Mr Herrmann said that Harris would say he had no intention to kill Mr Lewis, only to “scare him” by “temporarily relaxing the muscles of his buttock”.
He said that Harris had intended to inject Mr Lewis with “double the dose that would be given to an average male in a clinical environment”.
In the event, he had injected 5ml of the drug – the normal clinical dose- into Mr Lewis.
The prosecution said he was only prevented from injecting double the dose because of the “commotion” and the fact that the needle broke.
Mr Herrmann said this showed “the utter nonsense of the defendant’s assertion that his intention was only to scare and cause numbness (to Mr Lewis)”.
He said there appeared to be “no background to this offence (and) no motive”.
Harris later claimed there had been an “altercation” between him and Mr Lewis at the record store about a month before the attack.
Mr Herrmann said that although Mr Lewis “initially had no recollection of having ever seen the defendant before, investigations have revealed that it is right that the defendant visited the shop once before, on May 29, 2024, when he sold records to Gary Lewis (whose) work diary supports that”.
He added: “(Mr Lewis) said nothing out of the ordinary could have happened that day. After all, he runs a busy shop and it is his business to buy and sell vinyl records.
“It is expected that the defendant will say there was an altercation between them on that day, May 29, which involved Gary Lewis forcibly removing the defendant from the shop, causing him to go to the ground, probably on the street outside.
“Gary Lewis will say that’s a complete fiction: he’s never in the 15 years-plus that he’s had the shop had a single physical altercation with any customer, barely a cross word.”
CCTV of the subsequent July 2 incident showed Harris scurrying out of the vinyl shop “with a record in his hand”.
Christopher Daniel, a sales manager at a neighbouring shop, said he saw Harris squirt some kind of liquid out of his car window onto a wall in the alleyway.
“The Crown would say…he was trying to dispose of excess (liquid in the syringe) that he hadn’t managed to inject into Gary Lewis, probably because of the commotion,” said Mr Herrmann.
“In other words, he was trying to give Gary Lewis an even higher dose than he actually managed to.”
Police initially arrested Harris on suspicion of common assault because the “magnitude” of the crime wasn’t known at that stage. While being searched, he told officers he had left an empty syringe “with water in it” in the driver’s door panel.
He said he had “just squirted” the water into a wall and told officers there was no needle, just a “10-mil syringe”. When asked if he had injected Mr Lewis with anything, he said: “No.”
Even when an officer told him that Mr Lewis’s health was deteriorating rapidly and that they needed to know if he had injected him with anything noxious so paramedics could give him “the correct form of care”, Harris replied: “No, it’s just water in a syringe.”
When the arresting officer handed him over to a custody sergeant at Harrogate Police Station, she overheard Harris say he was an anaesthetist nurse and reported this back to officers and paramedics at the scene.
Mr Herrmann told the jury: “You will hear from the treating consultant at the hospital that that was an important part of the jigsaw to establish what was injected into Gary Lewis and to assist in how best he could be treated.”
He said although police initially found only a syringe with no needle in the driver’s side of Harris’s vehicle, they subsequently found a syringe with a broken needle in the back of the car. When the two syringes and needle were later tested, they were found to contain traces of the muscle-relaxant drug.
Mr Herrmann said “the only sensible conclusion is that the defendant intended to kill Gary Lewis” who mercifully survived the attack following expert medical care.
The trial continues.
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