‘Changed my whole life’: CBD stabbing victim details slow recovery as her alleged attacker is named

The victim of an apparently random stabbing attack in Melbourne’s CBD says she has been left unable to work and fearful of walking down the street.

Wan Lai has been posting on social media, documenting her recovery from a punctured lung since being attacked on Little Bourke Street on October 2.

She told her followers she had been left with a collapsed lung after the incident, which was captured on CCTV.

Fortunately for Lai, a woman across the street saw the incident and quickly came running to her aid, helping her hold the wound and stop the bleeding.

“The body is slowly recovering,” Lai said in her latest update on Wednesday. “I also met a few psychiatrists to talk to, hoping to calm myself down and regain the sense of security in Melbourne.”

Lai has moved house this week, hoping the fresh start will do her good. “The shock of that moment really changed my whole life,” she told her followers.

“I have temporarily lost all my financial resources and am not sure when I will be able to resume my working body. Doctors estimate that recovery will take at least one to two months, but it is still unknown whether I will be able to recover from the previous physical strength.”

In earlier updates, Lai thanked her followers for the support they had shown her, and detailed the regimen of painkillers and challenges she faced daily.

Lai’s brother-in-law Chia Ting confirmed she had relocated to another part of the city where she felt safer.

“She really wants to get back to normal life,” he said. “Myself and my wife really want to protect her, we don’t want to put any pressure on her.”

Ting also said Melbourne’s Taiwanese community had started to question whether Melbourne was as safe now as it had been in previous years. People have been sharing stories of their own crime encounters on Lai’s posts.

“I think after the COVID period it changed a lot – there are more dodgy spots in the city,” Ting said. “Overall I still love this city, but the security issue is a big issue. [The problem] is spreading around, even to [affluent] areas like Hawthorn.”

Ting said he was grateful to the woman who helped Lai directly after she was stabbed, though he still didn’t know who she was.

“Randomly she was on the side of the street, she ran to her and helped everything,” he said.

The accused attacker, 32-year-old Lauren Darul, faced Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on October 3, charged with intentionally causing injury, recklessly causing injury, and committing an indictable offence while on bail.

Darul had been living at a homeless shelter near the scene of the stabbing and has a history of mental health issues.

A “whereabouts” order was placed on Darul – a type of alert for police officers to check in on the welfare of someone who is unaccounted for – some time before the stabbing, but she was not seen until her arrest.

Lai was walking to work at the time of the stabbing. Kyle Hii, who manages a sushi eatery at Southern Cross Station where she is employed, spoke of his concern for Lai on the day of the incident.

Hii said alarm bells started ringing for him when his diligent employee was late for work.

“She always comes to work 15 minutes before she starts. That morning, she was about five minutes late so I started to get a little bit worried because she’s never late,” he said.

Moments later, Hii’s phone rang. It was Lai’s phone number, but the voice on the other end was unfamiliar.

“I picked the phone up, but it wasn’t her, it was someone trying to help her,” he said. “I could hear something happening in the background and Wan’s voice, so I knew something bad was happening.”

Hii said the woman on the phone, who had come to Lai’s aid, sounded nervous and urged him to contact Lai’s next of kin. After hanging up, he phoned Lai’s sister, Ivana.

“I called her sister straight away but when she didn’t know anything, I told her I’d find out more and call her back,” he said.

“What I heard from the woman that was helping Wan was that the ambulance was coming to pick Wan up. So I just told the sister, ‘I think something bad is happening, do you know anything about that?’ She said no. So I tried to call the woman back on Wan’s phone, but they weren’t picking up.”

Ivana then began frantically contacting hospitals across Melbourne in an attempt to locate her sister.

Lai has worked at the sushi store since it opened in March, with Hii describing her as a valued member of the team who brings warmth and leadership to the kitchen.

“Every now and then, our team speaks with her [on the phone] because all her best friends work here,” he said.

On Friday, Victorian Opposition Leader Brad Battin visited the site where the stabbing occurred. He said increased police search powers might have prevented the attack.

Battin brandished a metal-detecting wand of the type he has pledged to introduce as part of increased police powers if elected next year.

The proposed legislation, modelled on Queensland’s Jack’s Law, would give police the power to use metal detectors to search people anywhere where knife crime is considered a risk. The law was introduced in Queensland in 2023 following the fatal stabbing of teenager Jack Beasley in 2019.

“It is so important the Victoria Police can go out to the street to take knives off the offenders because the violent crime we’ve seen across Victoria cannot continue to go in the direction it is without the government reacting,” Battin said.

When asked about whether the government would consider implementing Jack’s Law, Premier Jacinta Allan said current police search powers were sufficient.

“As a result of those tougher stop and search powers for Victoria Police, they’ve seized more than 12,000 dangerous weapons,” she said.

“That is in addition to the more than 5000 machetes that have been handed in as part of our ban on machetes in this state.”

Get the day’s breaking news, entertainment ideas and a long read to enjoy. Sign up to receive our Evening Edition newsletter.