Baylor-Cook-London-Image
By David Walsh

Photo courtesy of Baylor Cook

BY LANDON WOODROOF

The Cook family set out for another day of fun on Wednesday, March 22.

Baylor, 20, was studying abroad in London and his parents and little sister had come out to visit him from Brentwood during his sister’s Spring Break. That day, the family had already taken a tour atop one of London’s iconic double decker buses and had decided next to visit the world famous Harrod’s department store for some shopping.

Before the shopping, though, Cook suggested they grab lunch at a little restaurant situated on a boat in Westminster that boasted great views of Parliament and Big Ben.

“It’s a really cool kind of restaurant you know if you were a local,” Baylor said.

The Cooks took the tube to Westminster, exited the station and started towards a crosswalk that took you from one side of the base of the Westminster Bridge to the other.

They began to cross the street with another group of people in front of them. The family got halfway across and stopped at a median when the traffic signal changed. The people just in front of them continued on.

And that’s when it happened.

“The people in front of us stepped across the street and on to the sidewalk, and just then that’s when the car came out of nowhere,” Baylor recalled. “There was no warning. You’d think with these types of things you’d hear screaming or people yelling to watch out, but the car just hopped up on the sidewalk.”

At first, Baylor thought it was an accident, or maybe a hit and run. Soon, though, he would discover that his family had been right at the scene of a terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of five people, including the attacker, and injured dozens. Although physically uninjured, Baylor is still coping with the experience and trying to process the thoughts and feelings that come along with witnessing so savage a scene.

Baylor, a student at Samford University, had moved to London near the end of January. The idea of studying abroad had appealed to him immediately.

He has aspirations of being a professional writer, and the thought of living around different cultures in a different country seemed like it would be a valuable experience.

So “when the opportunity arose, I jumped at it,” said Baylor, who was raised in Brentwood and graduated from Brentwood Academy.

Before long, Baylor grew to love “the beautiful city,” as he calls it, and was eager to show his family around when they visited. He had done just that until the day on the bridge.

Three or four people were hit by the careening car just a few feet in front of Baylor. The Cooks ran to assist them. Baylor began shouting at shocked onlookers to call for emergency services.

It still seemed like it might have been some awful road mishap until the police officers began to show up.

“When I was basically holding my sister [and] trying to get people to call emergency services a van pulled up and a lot of very big almost Marine-looking police officers got out in plain clothes and put on masks and large bulletproof vests and pulled out some of the biggest guns I’ve ever seen,” Baylor said. “They got in a formation and headed over toward [where the vehicle had gone]. At that point it kind of hit me that this was bigger than a hit and run. It was something far worse. And then later obviously the police corroborated that it was a terrorist attack.”

The family spent the next few days answering questions from counterterrorism officials, Baylor said. Rather than try to go back to his classes, Baylor chose instead to stick close with his parents and sister.

“I stayed with my parents at the hotel, and I mean it’s just four people that were in a pretty raw emotional state trying to process and comprehend what we had just seen.Trying to comprehend the incomprehensible,” he said.

On the Monday after the attack, Baylor decided to put into words what was going through his head. In an eloquent, emotional post on his blog, The Musing of a Normal Guy, Baylor struggled to comprehend the scope of the tragedy and what it meant for the way he viewed the world.

“You never know what true evil is like, until you experience it first hand,” he wrote. “It was unlike anything I have ever seen, it is something I will never be able to explain, and it is something I will never be able to forget.”

A religious person, Baylor also tried to reconcile his belief in a loving God with the tragedy and the suffering he had witnessed.

“I personally believe in God, and more often than not, when you tell people that you’re religious, they say the cliché phrase that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and that ‘everything is God’s plan,’” he wrote. “And with this situation, I have no idea how to process that. I don’t believe that any part of God’s plan would call for the lives of innocent people being taken. I just can’t, and don’t believe that…”

In a conversation on Tuesday, Baylor reiterated those thoughts. He also left open the possibility, though, that even if God did not have a hand in the attack itself, maybe God was there in the aftermath.

“All I know is that we were there and while others were running away my family and I were given the courage to help those in need and help those who were hit and were by themselves and were severely injured,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s a God thing. I know the courage came from somewhere because I’m not a hero or anything like that.”

Baylor’s family left on Sunday. He has support among the Samford community in London, but it has not been an easy few days.

“There have been a few people that I’ve kind of relied heavily on, and it’s just been a rough instance,” he said. “Some of the adrenaline … stays with you. Somebody dropped a plate and immediately I tensed up. Whenever I think about it, I tense up and am waiting for something to happen.”

The attack has stayed with him in other ways, too.

“Since the attack, whenever I close my eyes, I see the car running over those innocent people, walking in front of us,” he wrote in his blog post. “I hear the sounds of people screaming, running, and crying. I hear the cops yelling asking where the suspect went. I hear my sister crying, as I tried to hide her face from the horrible scene.”

When he sees those images, though, when he remembers something about his time on the bridge, Baylor does not shrink away. He has tried instead to channel those thoughts and feelings elsewhere, toward a place where he believes they might be of some help.

“Every time I think of that horrible scene, I pray for victims,” he wrote. “I pray for those injured, and those who died. I pray for their families. I pray for the people of London, this amazing city, that I have grown to love. And I pray that God will bring an end to this senseless violence. No one should ever have to witness that level of pure evil.”

Baylor asks, too, that others join him in his prayers.

“I would just ask the public for prayers because the city is still grieving,” he said. “They’re moving forward, but a lot of innocent lives were lost and a lot of innocent people were injured.”

Despite all he has been through, all he has seen, Baylor has no plans to leave London and go home. Instead he plans to take inspiration from his temporary home, a place that has soldiered through so much violence over the years, from the German Blitz during World War II, to decades of IRA bombs to the deadly 2005 terrorist attack on the city’s transit system.

“My mom helped me reason through this,” he said. “She said you have to follow the example of the city of London. If you let this alter your course, then they win. If you keep doing what you’re doing and stay there, they don’t win. That’s a hard thing to say when so many innocent lives were lost. I’m going to follow the example that the incredible people of London set. That we are not afraid, and we are going to move forward, and we’re stronger together.”