Liz Noble has a tattoo on her left wrist that reads, “I love you” – the words of the last text message she received from her son before he died, trapped in his bedroom, as the Rozelle apartment building burned around him.
That deadly blaze was deliberately lit by Adeel Ahmad Khan, who was last month convicted of the murder of Chris Noble and manslaughter of Bianka O’Brien and her baby son Jude, after setting his Rozelle convenience store alight in the early hours of September 3, 2014, triggering a massive explosion.
Today, several of Noble and O’Brien’s family and friends have given harrowing victim impact statements at Khan’s sentencing hearing at the NSW Supreme Court, telling of the heartbreak and trauma of knowing how the their loved ones must have suffered in their final moments.
“My son died alone trapped in a room knowing that he could not get out. The thought of that has no words that are adequate enough to describe,” Mrs Noble said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
NSW Police.
Though comforted by his final text message, Mrs Noble said sometimes it all become too much. She told the court she’d briefly contemplated driving her car into into a large tree, just to end the suffering.
“The unbalanced part of me wants to see him,” she said, crying.
Noble's two housemates managed to flee that night, but his door jammed and with bars on his windows, he had no way to escape.
One of those men, Corey Cameron, said today he was forced to listen to his best mate "screaming for his life" - a sound that still haunts him nearly two years on.
