Caroline, who lived next door to the family said she thought Axel was a ‘normal, moody teenager’, but picked up on his ‘weird’ behaviour – and has memories she is desperate to forget
The neighbour of triple killer Axel Rudakubana – who stabbed three little girls to death in Southport last year – says she has memories she “wants to forget” after police armed with rifles stormed the rural village of Banks.
Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty on Monday to the murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, after he broke into a Taylor Swift-themed party in July 2024 and launched a frenzied knife attack. He also admitted to the attempted murders of another eight children, as well as two adults, Leanne Lucas and Jonathan Hayes.
Caroline, who lived next door to the family but has since moved away from the area, said she thought the murderer was just a “normal, moody teenager”, but had picked up on his “weird” behaviour and was desperate to forget the moment cops stormed their street and pointed a rifle towards her property.
She said: “To us, it was just a family living next door who kept themselves to themselves, I thought the teenage son was a bit weird, like he just stared at you and didn’t really say anything at all.”
“I just put that down to him being a teenager but he did used to stare. He’d stare at me like he was staring right through me. I just thought he was a normal, moody teenager”, Caroline told the Echo. “The family themselves seemed normal, the mum used to always forget to put the handbrake on and I would knock on and say ‘your car’s rolled down again, you need to move it’ and she would say ‘no, no, I’ll get my husband to do it’.
“[The dad] would enter into a bit more conversation but it was just general chit chat. We had no problems living next to them, it was just a family getting on and kept themselves to themselves.”
On the day of the attack, Caroline was working from home when she noticed police arriving outside. She went downstairs and was met with an armed officer pointing a rifle at her in the doorway of her open backdoor. He told her to get in the house and close the door.
In the days that followed, police locked down the close and set up a cordon lasting weeks, while a number of forces helped with the Merseyside Police-led search of Rudakubana’s home.
Caroline continued: “The fact that I’ve moved out the area means I feel so much more relieved and settled because even though the events of the day don’t affect me, they kind of did because of what’s gone on next door. We were constantly questioned by police, constantly having police there, constantly having people coming down making threats. My son didn’t want to live here so he lived with his grandma for months.
“I had to deal with the trauma of having a gun pointed in my face when police first came to the close, that’s upsetting, and then finding out there were chemicals next door, I don’t want to have that anymore. They’re not the memories I want to remember, I don’t want that.”
She added: “It’s not Old School Close anymore, it’s the forgotten close. No crime was committed there but our lives were turned upside down.”
Village resident and local councillor Thomas de Freitas, who lives just five minutes from the home of Rudakubana, was completely unaware of his and his family’s existence in Banks. He said: “It’s so strange, no one around the village really saw them or knew them. No one I have spoken to knew the family. Some people told me they saw the family around now and then but no one has said they knew them, it’s odd.”
“It’s been a difficult time for everyone in the village,” he said. “Before this, it was just a little-known village just north of Southport. Our village’s name is now linked with all this terrible stuff. Residents at the time were struggling with all sorts of things.
“People living in the cordon were worried, they didn’t know what was going on, even things like not being able to get their bins emptied because of the cordon being in place. We quickly held a community meeting with the people in the village where we spoke to them about their worries and gave them the updates we could give them at the time.”
Axel Rudakubana, 18, of Old School Close, Banks, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 52 years at Liverpool Crown Court on Thursday, January 23.