CNN features writer Amy Gunia had just arrived in Sydney from Hong Kong on Sunday morning for a family vacation with her husband, toddler and baby.
The beach was crowded with families with children and people enjoying a swim after a hot summer day.
Her family had just finished an early dinner in North Bondi and were walking back south past the Bondi Pavilion when they heard a “cracking” sound.
“I thought maybe it was fireworks or some sort of celebration, so I turned around,” Gunia said.
“We had two kids in strollers and we saw people who were near the pavilion running. It immediately became a panic situation, everyone started running, cars were zooming at full speed, it was a kind of mass panic.”
“We paused for a moment before doing anything…because we thought this was Australia. Things like that don’t really happen here,” she said.
“We just stood there and turned around and looked and tried to understand what was going on, but the people who were a little closer were running and running really fast.
“So we decided to run with extreme caution and ran uphill to get away from the noise as quickly as possible.”
They kicked off their shoes, carried the stroller up several flights of stairs to their AirBnB, and fled. Data from her husband’s fitness tracker suggested he started running at 6:40 p.m. local time.
Helicopters were still flying overhead when she spoke to CNN by phone around 8 p.m. local time.
