A record shop owner who was attacked by a nurse armed with a syringe filled with a deadly drug says he still has no idea why he was targeted.
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” in July last year.
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.
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.
The defendant was found guilty of attempted murder and is due to be sentenced for the crime today.
Ahead of the sentencing, Mr Lewis spoke to the BBC about the attack.
Mr Lewis said: “The biggest thing for me is I have no idea why.
“He won’t admit it, he won’t say it. He made some pathetic excuse that there’d been an argument which there hadn’t.
“Like I said, it wasn’t random, it couldn’t have been more deliberate and targeted.
“Whether I’ll ever find out, I almost have to deal with the possibility that I might not and that is psychologically impacting.”
Mr Lewis said Harris would have got away with murder if he had not managed to get outside and people had come to his aid.
“The drug that they found it was does clear your system, which is why I would have died if I’d stayed in the shop.
“It would have disappeared and nobody would have looked for a pinprick in this piece of skin.
“It would have been put down in a cardiac arrest — man my age 65, not unheard of.”
Doctors told Mr Lewis his good health helped him cope with the attack.
“I’m continuing to look after myself because of that,” he added.
Mr Lewis said Harris had been a normal customer before the attack.
“In fact, he was talking more than your average customer about how much he loved the shop and his favourite records.
“He would pick a record up and say ‘this is on my favourites’ — customers do that all the time.
“He spent a while in the shop, bought a couple and then left. I thought that was the end of it.
“Then about an hour later he came back, which again is not unusual. Sometimes people have a rethink.
“Paid for that one album, I’ll always remember that one album, and as I turned left towards the till the next thing I remember is his head is by the side of my chair at hip level and he stabbed me with the syringe between the armrest of the revolving chair.”
The man then left the shop
Mr Lewis added: “He was about to get into his red car, very, very casual. He wasn’t rushing.
“I remember he took his jacket off, which was unusual, thinking back about a warm day. Why would a man carry a jacket.
“Well, probably now we know he had a syringe in his pocket. He casually put the bag across the driver’s seat into the passenger seat.”
Mr Lewis tried to stop the man from leaving the car park behind the shop by placing a shop sign in the way but the man drove his car at him.
Other people then arrived at the scene and Mr Lewis approached Harris who was still sat in his car.
“I actually went up to him and took a photo, I’ve got him on my phone as he sat there with his arm on the window as casual as if he was sat at traffic lights.
“I said ‘what is it, what did you do? He said ‘water mate’.”
Mr Lewis slowly began to lose consciousness after the exchange.
“I remember being on the floor totally unable to move. It was paralysis. Totally unable to move a muscle, make a noise.
“I could hear people say ‘can you hear me Gary? I could hear the police officer say ‘what was in the syringe?’
“Apparently I died on the footpath, my heart stopped on the footpath.”
Mr Lewis suffered a second heart attack in the ambulance but again was revived by medical staff.
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.”
During the trial, 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.
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