Hero shopper Ryan Bramble relives terrifying moment he looked Westfield Bondi Junction killer Joel Cauchi in the eyes after he joined group of vigilantes to try and stop knifeman with chairs

A heroic shopper involved in the Westfield Bondi Junction attack has recalled the moment he and others tried to help police subdue the knifeman.

Ryan Bramble was shopping at Zara with a friend on Saturday when they heard the blood-curdling screams of women as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi began his attack.

“I just heard women screaming and keep screaming,” Bramble told 2GB on Monday.

“We looked out the front and saw hundreds of people running.”

He said he was just a few feet away from Cauchi and made eye contact, but the knifeman didn’t seem interested in him.

“This guy walks around the corner very casually… and I see a huge Rambo knife in his hand,” Mr. Ramble said.

‘I look him in the eye. He looked at me, we were only a few feet apart, but he looked at me and just kept going. Just a really disturbed look on his face.”

Just then, hero police officer Amy Scott came running into the mall and asked where the perpetrator was and what he looked like.

Mr Bramble said shoppers made a quick decision to grab chairs and bollards and the officer followed as back-up.

2GB presenter Ben Fordham told Mr Bramble on Monday morning that he and others were putting themselves at risk.

‘At that moment I didn’t really feel like it. I just wanted to get that bastard,” Mr. Bramble said.

The hero shopper relived the moment on Sunrise, recalling the moment Cauchi froze as the group and police officer caught up to him.

“He just started charging straight at us – straight at the female police officer, at me and at the man in the white shirt,” he said.

“And as he did so, she shot him three times straight in the chest. Just as accurate.”

Business owner Bill Mohana recounted the terrifying moment the massacre occurred.

He was greeting “the girls” in his partner’s salon on the fifth floor of the mall when he turned around and saw “people running wild” and a “broken glass bottle” and a trail of blood.

Speaking to Nine, Mr Mohana described the confusion he felt during the early moments of the crisis before taking swift action to shelter himself and others in the store.

“I quickly closed the front of the store, locked everyone in, turned on the lights, turned everything off and put everyone in the back room,” he said.

‘I helped an older man who said: ‘let me in’. I quickly put him inside, brought them all to the back, closed the door and told everyone to ‘turn off the lights’ to pretend we were no longer in the store and the store was closed.”

Mohana said the wait for news was “terrifying and horrifying.”

“Like I had already seen the bodies on the ground and when I heard the gunshots I thought, oh, we’re next,” he said.

He said his partner, Victoria Kerr, hasn’t slept in two days.

Cauchi killed five women and a male guard during the disaster.

NSW Premier Chris Minns – who flew home from a family holiday in Tokyo on Saturday – spoke to radio station 2GB on Monday morning.

“I got a text message from my chief of staff saying call me urgently… which I thought was unusual,” he said.

‘I left [my family] at the airport and was able to catch a flight straight away. I just turned around, jumped on a flight and came back.”

He said Cauchi’s only interaction with NSW Police was a ‘move-on order’ while he slept in The Rocks.

Australian Red Cross Lifeblood has issued an urgent appeal for more blood donations after the attack left 12 people in hospital, many of whom suffered significant blood loss.

At least 50 witnesses reported the incident to NSW Police on Sunday as investigators continue to piece together how the horrific incident unfolded.