'He stood in the darkness and calmly raised the shotgun'

It was a wonderfully sunny May afternoon and Leslie Hummel was in her garden in Chelsea, west London, when she heard Mark Saunders start shooting. At first she thought it must be a firecracker. Then there was another loud bang and she heard a neighbour shout: “What the hell’s going on?”

A third shot was fired. “I realised it was a gun going off. I rushed for cover into my kitchen and called the police,” said Hummel, who lives in a smart four-storey Georgian town house just off the fashionable King’s Road with her husband Martin.

Their garden backs onto that of the £2.2m flat owned by Saunders, 32, the high-earning barrister who died in a shoot-out with police after a five-hour siege.

Hardly able to believe her ears, Hummel ran outside again to establish what was happening. “That’s when I saw Mark holding his gun,” she said. “He was shooting from the first floor and there was a large oval hole in his window.

“He was shooting into my daughter’s bedroom and, when I went inside, the wall there had been peppered in pellets and there was glass everywhere. My daughter had hung some watercolours she had bought on holiday and they were riddled with holes.”

Heavily armed police were soon pouring into the area and checking the houses. “I heard the police come to my front door and they followed me upstairs. I showed them the way to my daughter’s bedroom and I pointed [Saunders] out to the police. He was there with his shotgun.

“The police officer moved forward to see and was shouting out. Mark fired another shot and it hit the side of the house near the window. I could see the red dust from the brickwork.

“The police officer backed off; it was just six inches from his head. I heard him make a call to control. He asked for ‘permission to engage’.

“I remember thinking this was just incredible, completely unbelievable. Then another police officer started to come up the stairs. The gun he had was much bigger.”

Was this the moment that sealed Saunders’s fate? The barrister had fired on a police officer. He was known to have served in the Territorial Army. A gunman with military training would be considered an especially dangerous threat. On the other hand, he was firing a shotgun, which is lethal over only a very limited range, and no one had been injured or killed.

A few hours later Saunders was dead, shot five times by at least two police marksmen whose bullets hit him in the head, heart, liver and lower body.

His family were bewildered. “We are devastated at our tragic loss,” they said. “Everyone who knew and loved Mark appreciated his warmth and generosity.”

His father, Rodney, said: “He didn’t endanger anyone at all to my knowledge. We will want answers as to why police shot him.”

The police are unrepentant. “This was not a perceived threat; it was a real threat,” said one senior officer.

The extraordinary gunfight has raised many questions. What drove a seemingly rational, educated man to such desperation? Does a family heartache lie behind the tragedy, as some sources suggest? And did Saunders in fact hope to die in what some psychologists call “suicide by cop”?

On the face of it, the young barrister would fit no one’s profile of a crazed gunman. Privately educated at King’s school, Macclesfield, Saunders studied law at Christ Church, Oxford, and later joined QEB, the top-flight chambers specialising in divorce and custody disputes.

Another member there was Elizabeth Clarke, also an Oxford graduate. She helped Ed Vaizey, now an MP and a leading member of David Cameron’s circle, in his early legal career.

Clarke was eight years older than Saunders, but the difference did not seem to matter. Two years ago the barristers, each earning about £200,000 a year, married. They were an apparently “perfect” couple with a glittering future.

However, behind the affluent civilised facade there were discordant notes. At Oxford, Saunders had apparently been a member of the Cardinals, an all-male drinking society, election to which is based on how much “fun” someone is perceived to be or how drunk they get in freshers week.

There or later he developed a taste for red wine and whisky. That is not unusual in legal circles, as anyone familiar with the bars around the Temple will attest, but accounts of his drinking suggest periods of sobriety interspersed with worrying binges. His family admit that he had “drink issues”.

He and his wife faced other pressures, too. They had been involved in a protracted dispute over the Markham Square flat, which they had bought in a “home swap” with the previous owner, Kristian Robinson.

On Friday Robinson said that Saunders had become “stressed” when the transaction was jeopardised by a neighbour in a dispute over renovations by Saunders. “He was very well mannered but very particular,” he said. “We both liked hunting and country sports. He left a very fine gun cabinet in the old house.”

The couple were also believed to want to start a family. According to one friend, their hopes of children had suffered setbacks. A police source claimed that Saunders was troubled by doubts over his fertility.

Last week Clarke would only say that she and Saunders had been deeply committed to each other and had a “strong bond”. But something was clearly disturbing Saunders, who two weeks ago was seen by neighbours crying in the road outside his flat. A week ago he was seen in an uncharacteristic argument in the street.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of last week Penelope Russell, their next-door neighbour, noticed nothing amiss when she bumped into the couple on bank holiday Monday, the day before the shooting. “They told me they were going for a walk to St James’s Park as it was a lovely day,” she recalled. “They looked perfectly normal.”

The next morning Saunders sent his mother an e-mail at 7.30am and she noticed nothing odd. He went to work and so did Clarke.

Around lunchtime Saunders left his office and returned home. Contrary to earlier reports, Clarke was not in the flat. When Saunders started shooting, Russell was on the telephone in her kitchen next door.

“I heard a woman shout ‘What the f*** do you think you are doing?’,” said Russell. It was probably another neighbour. “Then before I knew it the police were here and about three of them came into my house all armed and wearing protective clothing.”

At first the police seemed prepared for a long siege and allowed Russell to stay in her home. “They told me the siege could go on for a very long time, as he was in his own house and there was food and drink there that could last for days,” she said.

As the shooting continued, however, their attitude changed. Russell was hurried out surrounded by police body shields. “There was more shooting and there was a lull,” she said. “There were around three or four such shootings and lulls throughout the evening.”

At some point, police on the ground contacted “gold command” at Scotland Yard for permission to use firearms. The officer in charge was Commander Ali Dizaei, who was once investigated over allegations of corruption and was later cleared of all charges.

Having assessed the threat, Dizaei granted authorisation. On the ground members of the CO19 specialist firearms unit put marksmen into place.

As the siege continued, Clarke arrived on the scene, but the police thought it was too dangerous for her to approach the flat. She paced the street nearby in tears.

Attempts to communicate with Saunders appear to have got nowhere. He refused to answer the telephone and simply shouted “I can’t hear you” when police tried to negotiate.

Hummel said there was no screaming or shouting: “I remember thinking that Mark was very calm. I saw how he was reloading his shotgun. He never pointed the gun out of the window; he stood in the darkness of the room and calmly raised the shotgun to his face to take aim. He wasn’t shaking, he wasn’t shouting or saying anything.”

At one point he threw the lid of a shoebox out of the window. Scrawled on it were the words “I love my wife dearly xxx”.

When the shooting began again, the police fired back.

What turned the family lawyer into a gunman? A detective close to the case said Saunders had had a row with his wife in the hours leading up to the siege. “It was about his alcoholism and his infertility,” the detective claimed. Saunders’s parents say they knew nothing about any such problems.

Another theory is that Saunders had a history of depression and felt suicidal. Rather than kill himself, he had opted for “suicide by cop” by putting the police in a position where they had no opton but to shoot him.

It is a phenomenon better known in the United States than Britain. According to Dr Barry Perrou, a former adviser to the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department, some 23% of police shooting incidents in America have the hall-marks of “suicide by cop”.

“Sometimes people just do not commit suicide by pulling the trigger themselves,” he said. “Here is a guy who had plenty of time and opportunity to surrender to the police, but he didn’t. Also the fact that he wrote a message to his wife and threw it out of the window suggests that he was about to do something terminal. It wasa farewell message.”

According to Perrou, most victims of “suicide by cop” do not have criminal records, are men in their thirties who are disappointed with their lives.

“You’ve got to remember that just because [Saunders] seems like someone who we think is very successful, it does not mean that he himself held that view,” Perrou said.

The police, still sensitive to accusations of being trigger-happy following the 2005 fatal shooting on the London Underground of the unarmed Jean Charles de Menezes, are bracing themselves for criticism. They insist that they acted correctly.

“Arguments that we could have put him to sleep or something are nonsense: shooting people in the leg and arm is the stuff of movies,” said a senior police source.

“When you’ve got a threat you must deal with it. When you have a person shooting at people, you have to do something to stop him.”

The 1967 Criminal Law Act allows police to use “such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime”.

A neighbour who witnessed the drama said he was sorry for Saunders’s family but did not think there was anything else the police could have done: “The parents may well ask how their Oxford graduate son ended up being shot dead by police in a siege; but we are asking how he came to be shooting at innocent people walking down the street.”

We may never know the full answer, but it is evident that Saunders needed help and, tragically, did not get it in time.

Sieges where police have opened fire

December 2005, Peeblesshire
Philip Thompson fired at officers with an airgun after a row with his wife at a house in West Linton. He surrendered to police after being hit by baton rounds.

May 2004, Lewannick, Cornwall
Police laid siege to Philip Prout, 53, after relatives reported he was threatening to kill them. He emerged from the house brandishing a samurai sword. Attempts to stun him with a baton gun failed. He was killed by a single bullet fired by police.

January 2003, Hackney, east London
Eli Hall, a criminal with a history of violence, held a man hostage and police laid siege to his house for 15 days. Hall fired on officers and was wounded in the mouth by a police gunman. Hall then set the building on fire and shot himself.

November 2001, Harrow, north London
Police besieged the home of Michael Malsbury, a 62-year-old minicab driver, for 10 hours after he made threats with a firearm. He told police during negotiations that he wanted them to kill him and emerged from the building raising his weapon at them. He was shot and his case was declared the first instance in Britain of “suicide by cop”.

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