My visit to the death scene at the Bataclan
No one has washed the blood off the street outside the back of the Bataclan club where the killers slaughtered 89 and wounded so many more – some of whom are among the 99 still struggling for life in Paris hospitals.
The tell tale dark splashes of human bleeding lead from the stage door some two hundreds yards along to a post office. where on Friday night survivors fled for protection.
Police tarpaulins cover the side walk.
The ritzy bus that had transported the rock band to play at Friday night’s concert is still outside. The driver’s window is shattered.
The colourful upper floors of Bataclan’s building look as nothing happened in the depths below.
But Caroline, a local resident, described what she saw that night.
She told me how upon hearing the mayhem she had crept out of her third floor flat beside the Bataclan and gone to the stage door, as more and more screaming and panicked people rushed out of it.
She saw one young man dragging the dead body of his friend out along the street. Others followed, dragging the bodies of strangers and loved ones alike, down another alleyway. No one wanted to leave the body of a person they had loved to the mercy of these lunatics.
She managed to get into the back of the Bataclan to the office where her neighbours worked – twelve of them. There were bodies everywhere, amid blood and continuing panic, as people tried to force their way out.
She has lived above the #Bataclan for 10 years. “I saw a pregnant woman shot in the legs” @jonsnowC4 #c4news pic.twitter.com/gKl7rjNMe9 — Thom Walker (@thompwalker) November 15, 2015
She recognised the body of the deputy manager, whom she knew well as a friend. But there was nothing she could constructively do.
She ran out with the others, peeling off to enter the sanctuary of her own building. “Don’t let anyone else in”, screamed a man inside, “we have no idea if the killers may not to try to come in too”.
Today, Caroline has still hardly slept. She is receiving counselling help as are so many others. She cries a lot. She doesn’t want to live here any more.
Her world has been wrecked.
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