An anaesthetist nurse has been found guilty of attempted murder after plunging a hypodermic needle loaded with a muscle relaxant into a record shop owner’s backside, rendering him unconscious and near to death.
Darren Harris, 58, had been browsing records at Betterdaze Record Shop & Juke Box Showroom, Gary Lewis’s music store in Northallerton, when he launched the “sinister and completely unprovoked on a stranger”.
Leeds Crown Court heard that Harris, of Amesbury Crescent, Middlesbrough, was mulling over whether to buy a David Bowie album when he plunged the needle into Mr Lewis’s buttock, a court heard.
The syringe and needle were loaded with the muscle relaxant Rocuronium, a clinical drug which induces paralysis in pre-op patients. Harris had worked with similar drugs in the past during his work in anaesthetics at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.
Prosecutor Richard Herrmann said that Harris was browsing records when he suddenly crept up to the counter, paid for an album, pulled out a syringe and stabbed the unsuspecting victim with the needle.
The jury heard that Harris had been ruminating on whether to buy a David Bowie album when he launched the near-fatal attack as Mr Lewis, who was sat behind the counter, swivelled round in his chair to put the money in a cash box.
Mr Lewis, who is in his 60s, was shocked but initially mobile and alert enough to chase Harris out of the shop, but collapsed on the pavement outside, lost consciousness and stopped breathing.
Mr Herrmann said that Harris, a vinyl record collector – who worked as a nurse specialising in surgical anaesthesia at the time – had been browsing records in Mr Lewis’s shop “for hours”, flitting in and out of the store most of the morning and into the afternoon before the “terrifying, sinister and completely unprovoked attack on a stranger” at around 2.15pm on July 2 last year.
Harris had been taking records to his car parked in an alleyway behind the shop but on his last return to the store he was carrying something much more sinister – a syringe and needle full of Rocuronium, a drug used in anaesthesia which causes muscle paralysis in pre-surgery patients.
Mr Lewis was sat behind the counter on his desk chair when Harris suddenly and “without warning” plunged the needle into the shop owner’s buttock.
Harris then “scurried” out of the store, chased by Mr Lewis who was initially unaffected by the delayed effects of the drug.
Mr Lewis dragged an advertising board from a neighbouring business and placed it at the entrance to the alleyway to stop Harris driving off in his car, but then he collapsed on the pavement, started fitting and went into respiratory arrest as neighbouring shop owners and members of the public went to his aid.
Police and an ambulance crew arrived and as officers arrested Harris in the back lane, paramedics carried out cardio-respiratory resuscitation on Mr Lewis who had “turned grey” and was unresponsive.
He was taken to hospital and came “very, very close to death” but ultimately survived following medical intervention from doctors whose prescience in correctly guessing the type of drug with which he had been injected had helped save his life.
The doctors’ guesswork was required because Harris, an expert in administering the drug, had refused to tell police, paramedics and others trying to save Mr Lewis’s life what he had injected into him, claiming it was merely water.
When quizzed by police following the attack, Harris told officers he had stolen the syringe from an “anaesthesia room” at the hospital where he worked.
When they asked him why he had taken the equipment and driven to Northallerton with it, he replied: “I don’t know. I just wanted to give him a shock to the system when I went to the record shop today.”
He said he had been working until 7am that day and had poured only sterile water from a container into the syringe. He then put the syringes and needle into his work bag before setting off for the record store in his car.
He said he had travelled the 22 miles from his home in Middlesbrough to Northallerton “to buy a couple of records, but I also came down with the intention of giving (Mr Lewis) a shock”.
Harris, of Amesbury Crescent, turned up in Northallerton at about 10am, parked his car in the back lane and went inside the record store in Zetland Street where he “browsed through some records, went upstairs, back downstairs, had another browse, bought a couple of albums, went back to the car and went back (to the store)”.
He said he was “umming and arring” about whether to buy a David Bowie album, “bought another one and had a look at the jukeboxes”.
He then went into Yesterdaze vintage shop next door to browse the antiques there, then returned to the record store, “bought another album and then just injected him” from the side of the counter as he was “paying for the album”.
“I just got the syringe and injected him,” Harris told police.
“I thought if I just inject him, he would panic.”
When Mr Lewis collapsed on the pavement outside, Harris said he thought he was “having a panic attack”.
“It seemed he had gone a little bit dizzy,” said Harris.
“I sat in the car, but I wasn’t taking much notice. Some bloke was saying, ‘What have you done?’
“I just said I have injected him with some water.”
Harris told police he had attacked Mr Lewis because of an “altercation” at the record store about a month earlier, on May 29, when, according to Harris, there was some kind of incident and the shop owner escorted him out of the building.
The prosecution said although there was evidence to show that Harris was at the record store that day, Harris’s claim that there had been an “altercation” was “complete nonsense” because Mr Lewis had never had a “single physical altercation, not even a cross word” with anyone at the shop for the 15 years-plus he had been running the business.
Mr Herrmann said that, bizarrely, there was “no background” or motive for the attack.
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