An anaesthetist nurse accused of trying to murder a shopkeeper by injecting him with a potentially lethal dose of muscle relaxant did not intend to kill, his barrister claimed today.
Darren Harris, 58, is accused of trying to kill Gary Lewis at his vinyl-record shop by filling a clinical syringe and sticking the hypodermic needle into his backside.
Mr Lewis, who is in his 60s, was sat behind the counter of his shop in Northallerton when Harris crept up to the till as if he were about to buy a record, Leeds Crown Court heard.
But then, “without warning”, he crouched down, reached forward and stabbed Mr Lewis in the buttock with a needle loaded with the lung-stopping drug.
Due to the delayed effects of the drug, Mr Lewis was able to get up and chase Harris out of the store before collapsing in the street, losing consciousness and going into respiratory arrest.
Harris was subsequently charged with attempted murder after Mr Lewis, who “came close very to death”, ultimately survived the “terrifying and sinister attack”.
Today, in the second week of Harris’s trial, the prosecution said that Harris had “selected” Mr Lewis as an “ideal, vulnerable target” and had “stalked his prey” in what they claim was a “wicked plan to kill”.
But Harris’s barrister Sean Smith claimed that Harris had merely tried to cause “aggravation or annoyance” to Mr Harris when he injected him with the surgical drug which rendered patients unable to breathe unaided and without medical intervention.
He alleged that the incident stemmed from a previous “altercation” between the two men at the record store in Zetland Street about a month before the syringe attack.
Mr Smith said his client was a man with a previously unblemished record who had worked in the NHS for many years before his arrest.
Harris, from Middlesbrough, also denies an alternative count of causing grievous bodily harm with intent. He admitted a further charge of administering a noxious substance thereby causing really serious harm or endangering life before the trial.
Mr Smith claimed that Harris – who worked at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough at the time of the incident – had already “confessed his guilt” by admitting that he had injected Mr Lewis with the muscle relaxant, albeit only to “scare” him and with no intention to kill.
Neither the prosecution nor the defence had been able to ascertain how much of the drug had been injected into Mr Lewis.
A clinical consultant said he believed that a “large dose” had been administered, but Mr Smith said that only part of the liquid inside the syringe had been injected.
He asked the jury to consider why, if Harris intended to kill the victim, did he “not inject all of the drug?”
“Why not press the plunger all the way down?” he added.
He suggested that Harris, being an experienced anaesthetist nurse, could have “selected any drug” and one that could have caused more harm, such as an opiate, if he really wanted to kill Mr Lewis.
The jury heard that Harris was ostensibly on a shopping trip when the “completely unprovoked” attack occurred on July 2 last year.
Harris, described as a vinyl-record enthusiast, had been “browsing for hours” inside Mr Lewis’s Betterdaze Record Shop & Juke Box Showroom in Zetland 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.
Prosecutor Richard Herrmann described what happened next as a “completely unprovoked, indiscriminate attack of extreme violence by a complete stranger in broad daylight”.
“At 10am, shortly after (Mr Lewis) 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,” he added.
“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 “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.
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.
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 he then 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.
“The attack rendered the victim completely paralysed and unable to communicate in any way with those who were trying to save him,” said Mr Herrmann.
Police and an ambulance crew arrived at the scene and paramedics carried out cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on Mr Lewis.
Harris, who had been prevented from driving off, was standing just a few metres away, apparently unconcerned as the dreadful scenes unfolded.
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”, which was an “egregious lie”.
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.
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 beyond question that Harris had stolen the drug and the syringe and needle from the hospital to enable him to “carry out his wicked plan”.
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.
Harris claimed he had no intention to kill Mr Lewis, only to “scare him” by “temporarily relaxing the muscles of his buttock”.
But Mr Herrmann 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”.
The average pre-surgery dose was 5ml, but Mr Herrmann said that Harris may only have been prevented from injecting double that dosage because of the “commotion” and the fact that the needle broke.
He 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 that, bizarrely, 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.
However, Mr Herrmann said although investigations had revealed that Harris did visit the shop once before, on May 29 last year, and sold records to Mr Lewis, “nothing out of the ordinary could have happened that day”.
Harris – who decided not to take to the witness stand to give evidence – had previously claimed that on this occasion, Mr Lewis forcibly removed him from the shop, but Mr Herrman said this was a “complete fiction”.
CCTV of the stabbing incident on July 2 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.
While being searched by police following the attack, Harris told officers he had left an empty syringe “with water in it” in his 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 noxious, he said: “No.”
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 both found to contain traces of the muscle-relaxant drug.
In his closing speech to the jury, Mr Herrmann said that Harris’s decision not to take to the witness box lent even more credence as to his murderous intentions on the day in question because he had “no answers that would have stood up to scrutiny”.
He said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Harris intended to kill Mr Lewis and that the defendant’s claims that he would have used an opiate drug if he really wanted to kill were “nonsense, a smokescreen to distract you from seeing what was clearly his intention, and this was to kill Gary Lewis”.
He said although it hadn’t been established exactly how much of the noxious substance Harris had injected into Mr Lewis, it could be assumed there was enough to cause “complete muscular paralysis” and therefore cause death “in a matter of a few short minutes without sufficient respiratory or medical support”.
“The defendant then stood by and watched as Gary Lewis was effectively dying, all the while not using his skills and experience to save him and refusing to tell the truth (to witnesses) about what he’d done,” added Mr Herrmann.
“The Crown say you can be sure that when the defendant injected Gary Lewis with (the drug), he intended one thing and one thing only, and that was to kill Gary Lewis.”
Mr Herrmann said that the two syringes found in Harris’s car were virtually empty and that the one with the broken needle, “which must have been the one he used (to inject Mr Lewis)”, had a 20ml capacity. The other had a 10ml capacity.
The consultant clinician who treated Mr Lewis in hospital said he believed that Harris had injected the victim with a “large dose”, not the “standard, initial dose” of 5ml normally given to patients before surgery.
Mr Herrmann said that Harris’s claim that he had only injected “3ml, 4ml or 5ml” was an attempt to “minimise his culpability”.
He pointed to evidence given by a doctor and matron at James Cook Hospital who said that “with all (Harris’s) training and all his experience and his very high banding and grading in the NHS”, he would have “absolutely known about the effects and risks associated with that drug which he had so routinely been involved with in his decades working in surgical theatres”.
Mr Herrmann said that one “terribly disturbing feature of the case was that, as the minutes ticked by” after Mr Lewis had collapsed unconscious on the pavement, Harris was stood nearby, “apparently emotionless, remorseless” and unconcerned by the harrowing events unfolding, while his victim must have been “very, very close to death”.
“He lied and lied to those who were desperately trying to save Gary Lewis’s life,” added Mr Herrmann.
“He, and only he, knew what he had injected into Gary Lewis. It was him and only him, an experienced healthcare professional, who held the keys to saving Gary Lewis’s life and to help the emergency services administer the right reversal agent.”
A taxi driver who gave evidence said that “while this was happening, (Harris) was just sitting in his car, like nothing had happened”.
The named witness added: “He didn’t look like he was remotely bothered about anything.”
A female witness described the surreal spectacle of seeing Harris sat nonchalantly in his car as “almost like watching a TV programme”.
“He sat there shrugging his shoulders,” she added.
“It was as if he thought it was ridiculous that any of us would want to stop him.”
The prosecution said it was beyond question that Harris had driven to Northallerton with the intention of injecting Mr Lewis with the muscle relaxant.
Mr Herrmann said that Harris’s “strange comings and goings” from the shop and his odd behaviour in the street before the attack had all the hallmarks of a man “stalking his prey, waiting for the ideal time to strike”.
Harris, of Amesbury Crescent, Middlesbrough, denies attempted murder and the GBH allegation on the grounds of lack of intent.
The trial continues.
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