IDTA member Colin Frith helps brave hero, 77, who was stabbed in the abdomen as he tried to save MP Jo Cox
From The Mail Online, 17 June 2016:
The hero pensioner who tried desperately to fight off MP Jo Cox’s crazed attacker ‘blew a kiss to his wife’ to assure her he was okay as a dance teacher battled to save his life.
Bernard Kenny, 77, was stabbed in the stomach as he bravely wrestled with the attacker, who had shot the Labour MP three times and stabbed her.
But even as he clung to life, the have-a-go hero was thinking of others: eyewitnesses revealed he blew a kiss to his distraught wife Doreen, comforting her with the words ‘I’m alright’.
Meanwhile, Colin Frith, a local dance teacher, was trying to save his life.
Mr Frith discovered Mr Kenny lying in his blood-stained t-shirt on the floor of a cafe moments after Ms Cox was shot and stabbed.
‘It was a crazy scenario. There was blood pouring from his wound and at one point I feared he was going to die,’ Mr Frith, 28, told MailOnline.
‘He was lying on the floor of a cafe and I was bandaging his chest and comforting him.
‘We asked him gently what had happened outside but he didn’t say very much.
‘He just said “I was trying to help her”.’
It has since been revealed Mr Kenny had tried to tackle the attacker, who approached Mrs Cox as she made her way to a constituency surgery on Thursday.
It is thought he and his wife had gone into the town square to buy bananas.
Mr Frith, a trained first aider, knew nothing of what had unfolded until he was alerted by one of his employees.
‘I was setting up for the tea dance when Stan, my 85-year-old doorman, yelled for me to come outside,’ he said.
‘I could see a lady lying in the road by the parking lane, and I thought she’d been hit by a car. People were screaming ‘She’s been shot!’.
‘And I thought ‘ Why am I outside if there’s a gunman’ and started to panic.’
It was then he took cover in the cafe, Sandwich & Co, where the elderly man was lying on the floor.
‘I saw a man who I didn’t know laying on the floor with his hand to his chest, he was bleeding quite a lot and his shirt was soaked in blood.
‘A number of people were around him and two girls were telling him to keep holding the wound. I ran back to my workplace to get my first aid kit.
‘Back at the cafe I lifted up the man’s shirt and could see it was a stab wound. I put any bandages I could grab as quickly around the wound which was between his rib cage and diaphragm area.
‘Me, my friend Scott and the girls told him to lie still and told him we’d take care of him.’
But within moment the seriousness of the situation became all too apparent.
He had been talking a bit and then he suddenly went into shock and started shaking and all the colour drained from him,’ Mr Frith, of nearby Birkenshaw.
‘I thought ‘Oh no he’s going to go!’ and I willed him to stay with us.
‘His wife was watching it all in the cafe. She was really upset and so worried about him.’
Paramedics were at the scene within five minutes, rushing him to hospital.
Mr Kenny, who has two sons, is now recovering in hospital, police confirmed this evening, with his anxious family keeping a bedside vigil.
It is believed the blade pierced his liver, but missed his heart.
‘I pray that he pulls through and makes a full recovery,’ said Mr Frith.
‘He was so brave.
‘People need to acknowledge just how brave he was. He went up to the armed attacker and tried to stop him. He is a true hero.’