The man whose head was almost cut in half by axe attacker Evie Amati in Sydney has broken his silence about his near death and his fury at her light prison sentence
Ben Rimmer has revealed how Amati slammed the axe into his face and in an exclusive interview told news.com.au, "If I hadn't turned my head at the last minute, she would have cut my head in half.
Rimmer has released disturbing never-before-published photographs of him after the attack, and details of how his face is now held together with metal plates he can feel through his skin, reports news.com.au
He is doing so in an effort to get Amati's sentence increased on appeal. She was sentenced to a minimum of four-and-a-half years behind bars, after her lawyer argued her transgender operation caused her immense pain and contributed to her later trying to kill strangers
Rimmer has revealed his disgust at the light sentence Amati got for the sinister attack - attempting to murder him and two others
"She went there to kill. It's only pure luck that I'm alive and she's not remorseful. She's intelligent … calculating," he said
"She'll do her time easily and get paroled in mid-2021. It's played out perfectly for her, perhaps better than she expected.
Rimmer spoke exclusively for the first time as he launched a petition on change.org to have Amati's sentence appealed to have her kept in prison for at least 10 years.
News.com.au has learned that Amati, who has been held in three different women's prisons since her arrest two years ago, has used her intelligence and skills as former union organiser Karl Amati to push other female inmates around in the system
Ben Rimmer believes Amati, who news.com.au reported was an arrogant and lazy union staffer with a huge sense of entitlement when working as an organiser for the CPSU, will walk out of prison scot-free in mid-2021 and won't be reformed
Rimmer, meanwhile, will spend the rest of his life with four titanium plates in his face, including an orbital plate which moves and which he can feel every time he touches it
This is the plate inserted in the area where if he hadn't turned his face slightly just before the blow, Amati would have struck him a few millimetres closer to his brain, removing his eye and killing him
On the night a drugged-up Amati wielded the 2kg axe she had bought two months earlier, Ben Rimmer was on his way home when he made the fateful decision to stop at the Enmore 7-Eleven to buy a pie at 2.20am on Saturday, January 7, 2017
The then 32-year-old senior project co-ordinator was running late after drinking beer out with his mates. His wife was three months pregnant.
Unknown to Rimmer, his life was about to change forever at the hands of Amati who just one hour earlier at 1.13am posted on social media, "One day I am going to kill a lot of people"
He was getting a pie from the shop fridge, when Amati strolled into the shop carrying the long-handled axe casually in her left hand
Amati did a lap of the shop, passing Rimmer who then queued at the till behind Enmore shop owner Sharon Hacker, who was buying milk
Amati was on "love drug" MDA, antidepressants, transgender hormones, cannabis and vodka and was consumed by resentment after storming out of a failed Tinder date with a woman
She had just changed her Facebook status to: "Humans are only able to destroy, to hate, so that is what I shall do" and listened to the dark-themed song, Flatline, by US metal band Periphery
Amati had also just sent a Facebook message to one of the women she was out with on the Tinder date, writing: "Most people deserve to die, I hate people".
As the CCTV inside the Enmore 7-Eleven shows, Amati entered the store before approaching Rimmer at the cash register
While he cannot remember all of the encounter because of the catastrophic head injuries he received, Rimmer knows at first he thought Amati's axe was a fancy dress prop
"I remember being struck. But I turned at the last minute, otherwise she would have chopped through my head straight through the front of my face
Doctors later estimated it Rimmer hadn't turned, the brain injury caused by Amati would have killed him
"Her aim was to kill people," he told news.com.au. "It was pure luck no-one was killed.
Rimmer wasn't immediately aware of what had happened other than "it was like a king hit". "It didn't register straight away, it took about 30 seconds," he said
"I fell to the ground. I was prone, bleeding profusely."
Starting to panic that he might bleed out, so fast and flowing was the blood from his face, Rimmer took off his shirt and said, "I tied it around my head trying to stem it.
At the time, he was not aware that Amati had also struck Sharon Hacker in the head with her axe. As Hacker lay helpless on the ground, Amati brought down a second vicious blow which would certainly have killed her, but narrowly missed
Bleeding on the ground and screaming in panic as the pain kicked in, Rimmer yelled at the 7-Eleven proprietor to lock the doors of the shop, for fear of Amati returning to finish them offhttps://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12196662
Comment by Parrhesia on January 26, 2019 at 7:13pm
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