Nov 2000 Volume 81 Number 11 "serving the protectors"
A HORROR MOVIE Come to Life
By Brett Williams

When an armed attacker’s bloody assault left a mother and child fighting for their lives, two Whyalla cops launched a fearless rescue. But the unexpected gore they confronted has never left them.

Blood spurted fountain-like from a gaping wound in a woman’s neck after her de facto husband viciously stabbed her in their Whyalla home. Sherie Bowers, then 22, fled in terror on that September night last year, until she reached the safety of a neighbour’s house. There, she collapsed in a front room, hysterical and at risk of bleeding to death.

Her neighbours quickly covered her slashed neck with towels and called authorities.

Constables Richard “Chuck” Norris and Daryl Phillips - alerted to the incident by police radio - charged to the Cowled St scene. They had that evening already responded to a domestic dispute between Bowers and her 35-year-old husband, Santiago Vivas.

Norris and Phillips - then 30 and 33 - had brought calm to an argument over squandered money, and left without any concern they would have to return. But it seemed that, since then, the argument had escalated to savage violence.

So now, Norris and Phillips were back in Cowled St - and within only two minutes of the 11pm call. The two cops found the street quiet and without any signs of a minutes-old attempted murder. They wondered momentarily if the call had been a hoax, but then found a trail of Bowers’ blood along her neighbours’ driveway.

Moments later - inside the house - a neighbour uncovered Bowers’ wound to show the officers. “Daryl and I both saw that towel getting pulled away from her neck,” says Norris, “and blood shot across the room! I thought: 'Oh, my God! This is the real thing. It’s happened’.”

The scene struck Phillips as looking like a B-grade horror film clip, in which blood shoots metres into the air from the neck of a decapitated body. He once considered such depictions as over-dramatized but has since changed his view.

To reassure the terrified woman - whose hands were also slashed - Phillips made out her life-threatening neck injury was “just a flesh wound”.

Then, amid the hysteria and nerve-racking tension, Bowers gave the officers the news they least wanted to hear. She had left behind not only Vivas when she fled, but also their four-month-old baby, Bradley. He remained at the mercy of Vivas in their house back across Cowled St.

“So we left there (the neighbours’ house),” says Norris, “and went out to the street. I was going to ring him (Vivas) to see if we could get him to come out of the house. As I was doing that, a bystander came up and said: 'There’s a fire in the house!’

“We could see through the bedroom window the glowing and the flames. I said to Daryl: 'It’s too late. We’ve got to go in’.”

The officers jumped the property’s front fence, “bashed on the door”, and bellowed at Vivas to “open up”. They heard nothing, and so kicked the door open. As they peered into the house from the porch before charging inside, they heard a thump.

Both officers suspected Vivas might still be armed with his knife and preparing to charge them. In fear of that scenario they cautiously stepped back, but nothing happened.

“So,” says Norris, “we stuck our heads right in and saw he was passed out in the hallway.”

Phillips stepped straight toward Vivas, whose seeming unconsciousness he never believed to be genuine. Norris ran to the master bedroom in search of the baby as the house filled with thick, black smoke.

He found the infant pushed up against the bedroom wall in a bassinet at the foot of a burning double bed. Seemingly oblivious to his father’s earlier rage, little Bradley - dressed in a jump suit - stared wide-eyed and innocently up at Norris.

Avoiding metre-high flames and struggling to breathe, Norris snatched the baby from his bassinet. “With one hand,” says Norris, “I shielded his head and put him across my chest to keep the smoke away from his face, and then ran out.

“I just went into a robotic stage, where you just do what has to be done; you don’t think of anything else.”

Meanwhile, Phillips had, with good reason, positioned himself between Vivas and the bedroom. This was to make himself an obstacle to Vivas if he jumped up from either feigned or genuine unconsciousness to attack Norris.

Says Phillips of his strategy: “I thought: 'If he’s going to make a move, he has to get himself off the ground. That way, I’ll be on top of him before he gets anywhere’.”

But Norris soon rushed by, cradling the baby tight against his chest. As he past, Phillips suggested he leave the child with one of the gathered local residents outside and return. Norris agreed, and carried the baby to the safety of the outdoors.

But, once there, he feared handing the child over could be the wrong option. “Suddenly,” he explains, “this thought entered my mind: 'If I do that, and come back out after and the baby’s gone, I’ve got some explaining to do’.”

So Norris asked a bystander to go into the house to help Phillips drag Vivas outside.

Meanwhile, Phillips could see that Vivas - dressed only in trousers - was breathing and not, at that time, armed with his knife. He remained suspicious and on his guard, but left him momentarily, ran to the bedroom and tried to smother the fire with a quilt. But the fire had penetrated deep within the mattress; it was impossible for Phillips to extinguish with only the quilt.

He headed back to the hallway expecting to meet up with Norris, but instead found the bystander leaning over Vivas. Together, they hurriedly carried him outside, where Phillips laid him on the ground in the coma position.

Now, Phillips wanted to be sure that no one else was in the house. He ran back inside and checked every room amid the thick, overpowering smoke. Again he tried to extinguish the fire - this time with a garden hose.

“There was just so much smoke that I couldn’t breathe,” he says. “I closed the door and came back out. All the night shift had started rolling up by then.”

But the night’s greatest tragedy was yet to reveal itself. As Norris had waited out on the street clutching the baby, he felt something wet on his hand. “I pulled my torch out,” he says, “and shone it on my hand. It was covered in blood! I realized the baby had a gash on his neck!

    

“I knew it was pretty bad because his jump suit was drenched in blood, and all his neck was covered in blood.”

In a gutless act of armed assault on a defenceless infant, Vivas had left a deep, one-inch gash in Bradley’s tiny neck. Norris remembers “how big the hole was”. It staggered him.

He sprinted across the road with the baby to two paramedics who were treating Bowers. They immediately gave Bradley oxygen and soon rushed him and his mother to hospital.

Norris had now done all he could for the child. He stayed at the house until crime-scene officers arrived. Phillips went to hospital by ambulance with Vivas, whom he would remain guarding until after 2am.

The two officers met at the hospital, briefed detectives - in whose custody they left Vivas - and went back to Whyalla police station. There, they unwound with a locker-room beer until 3am and reflected on their actions.

“The wound on the baby’s neck shook me up,” admits Norris. “He must have been close to dying, because that room was filled with thick, black smoke. All I could think was that he (Vivas) had allegedly done this to his child and just left him. There was no way that that little baby could defend himself. I just couldn’t get my head around it.”

Phillips thought that, for his re-entry to the smoke-filled house, the fire department chief might yet criticize him. And neither officer had, for a moment, considered his own safety.

Not until days later did they begin to appreciate the danger in which they had placed themselves.

But both had survived uninjured, and were the next day back on the job. Says Norris: “You can’t just say: 'I’ve finished with that job now; I’ll just push it aside and forget about it’. It was still there. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”

And in the end, no one ever criticized either officer’s actions. Rather, each was awarded a police bravery medal at Fort Largs last September. They were proud yet surprised to receive them.

“I just did what I thought had to be done,” says Norris, “and no one died. But in the same respect, any other copper at Whyalla would have done exactly the same thing.”

Phillips sees it all as a part of police work. “If it happened again,” he says, “I’d have no hesitation, and wouldn’t do anything differently.”

Vivas was charged with two counts of attempted murder and ordered to trial in the SA Supreme Court. He was convicted only of two counts of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm and sentenced to four years and nine months’ imprisonment. He will be eligible for “pre-parole” release on September 13, 2001.

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