A woman who met accused 7-Eleven axe attacker Evie Amati on the dating app Tinder has told a court how she "freaked out" and blocked Amati after receiving a message saying "One day I'm going to kill a lot of people" in the hour before the attack.
Amati, 26, is on trial in the New South Wales District Court over the incident, which took place at a 7-Eleven store in the inner Sydney suburb of Enmore in the early hours of January 7, 2017.
Customers Ben Rimmer and Sharon Hacker were struck with an axe at the store and suffered injuries from the blows, which were captured in graphic CCTV footage.
A third man, Shane Redwood, narrowly avoided getting hit on the street outside by wielding his backpack as a shield, the court heard earlier this week. All three victims were strangers to Amati.
Amati has pleaded not guilty to six charges, including two of wounding or causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder, with her barrister arguing she was experiencing a mental illness at the time.
Mickila Jahnsen, 27, gave evidence on Wednesday morning via video link from the United States.
She told the court she had matched with Amati on Tinder and the pair started talking on January 6 on the app and then over Facebook Messenger. That night, Amati went over to Jahnsen's house where, along with Jahnsen's housemate, they drank vodka and took a drug they believed was MDMA, or ecstasy.
The trio then got in a car with the woman who sold them the MDMA and her partner, and they all headed to the Burdekin Hotel in Surry Hills.
On the way, Amati asked them to stop the car so she could get out and go home, which came as a surprise, Jahnsen said.
"We were all kind of worried … I messaged her to see if she was alright. She said no. She seemed kind of mad, angry, and I was confused why," she told the court.
The pair entered into a heated conversation on Facebook Messenger, in which Amati said she didn't feel any positive chemistry with Jahnsen and had gotten the impression Jahnsen thought she was "ugly", the court heard.
"She said ‘People like you are what’s wrong with the world’ or something along those lines," Jahnsen said. "She called me a psychopath and then she said ‘One day I’m going to kill a lot of people.’"
"Then I blocked her on Facebook. It scared me, I was freaking out. I blocked her and then she messaged me on the Tinder app saying ‘I know where you live.’ And then I blocked her on that."
Jahnsen also said she had not seen media reports and had no idea what had happened at the 7-Eleven shortly after this message exchange until detectives knocked on her door three weeks later.
She and her then-housemate, Tenika Forgacs, were cross-examined at length over their first statements to police, which did not mention they had taken MDMA that night.
Both women said they were shocked by what had happened and had feared repercussions if they admitted to taking drugs to the authorities.
Amati's barrister, Charles Waterstreet, told the court earlier this week that Amati had thought she was taking MDMA that night but the capsule she took was actually MDA – an amphetamine.
He asked Jahnsen if she had ever taken MDA. "I don’t even know what that is," she said.
Amati looked frustrated and shook her head repeatedly during Jahnsen's evidence.
The CCTV footage from inside the 7-Eleven. Warning: graphic and violent scenes.
A second woman who met Amati on Tinder, 24-year-old Hannah Robinson, also gave evidence Wednesday.
She told the court she and Amati had exchanged romantic messages after matching on the app in late 2016, but had never met in person.
In early December, Robinson started dating a man and changed her Facebook relationship status to "In a relationship" on January 6, the day before Amati went to the 7-Eleven with an axe.
“I noticed that she had unfriended me a couple of days later," Robinson told the court.
Robinson also received a message from Amati on December 3, 2016, saying “OMG I just destroyed an old couch with a new axe. It was incredibly satisfying but gives me ideas haha," the court heard earlier this week.
Waterstreet said Amati had bought the axe that day and destroyed the couch because it was too big to get out the door of the house, and the message to Robinson was a joke.
"[Amati] ordered through Marrickville Local Council to pick up the remnants of the couch as special pick-up," he said. "It was completely and utterly innocent."
The court also heard evidence about the state Amati was in when she was found lying in the front courtyard of Julian's House of Hair, a salon across the road and down from the 7-Eleven, just before 3am on January 7.
Several police officers testified on Tuesday that Amati appeared to be unconscious and unresponsive when they found her. Prosecutors allege she was feigning unconsciousness at the scene.
Paramedic Joseph Arthur Douch said he had treated Amati and assessed her as a "three" on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), which is a way of recording how conscious a person is. Three is the lowest possible score and 15 is the highest.
But he said he had formed the opinion that Amati's apparent unconsciousness was "behavioural" – which he explained as "essentially someone choosing to feign unconsciousness" – rather than based on a medical reason.
This was after he had seen various things that were not conducive to somebody who is a GCS three, including Amati's eyelids flickering, her flexing her left hand, and noticing she wasn't completely limp when she was placed in the ambulance, he told the court.
"Someone who is a GCS three and truly unconscious, I would not expect their eyelid to flicker when I gently touch their eye area," he said.
Douch agreed under cross-examination that his notes had recorded Amati as a GCS three four times up until 4am, when she sat up in a stretcher at St Vincent's hospital and he changed the reading to a 14.
Nicholas Kalikajaros, the bar manager of the Sly Fox – an Enmore pub around the corner from the 7-Eleven – told the court he had seen Amati raise her head and look at him and other bystanders for about three seconds while she was being detained by police on the pavement outside the hairdresser.
"I could see a young female on the ground surrounded by five or six police officers. She was being held down by at least one," he said.
"The only thing that I did see was that at one point she did lift her head up and look directly at me and the other two people on the corner."
Waterstreet asked Kalikajaros a series of questions about the reliability of this evidence, including whether he had had a drink that night, whether he wears glasses, and if there's "anything wrong with your eyes".
Kalikajaros answered no to all three.
Asked if he could have been mistaken in what he saw, he answered: "I had a clear view of her head at the time between the legs of two officers. The legs didn’t move. She raised her head, she tilted her head [towards me and the other onlookers], she put it back down over the course of three seconds."
The trial before Judge Mark Williams continues.