I saw my friend down the road,
shaking and looking at me, like, “What the hell is this?”
I was like, “Man this is a terror attack.”
Keep moving!
People ran for their lives, not just out of instinct,
but because they were told to.
So we did a route. We went from spot to spot to spot,
down at the Tate, then the Millennium Bridge.
Then I said, “I’m going home to get food,”
and they went off to Borough Market.
A major incident in central London.
Witnesses say a van mounted the pavement on London Bridge.
We started to head to London Bridge,
and on the way, I saw someone not having a good moment.
Armed police have closed the bridge in both directions,
and there are also reports of a stabbing attack.
He was holding himself like this,
and the people who were surrounding him
were kind of like worried as hell.
Their faces were kind of scary,
like it was not something normal.
Six people were killed and at least 48 injured by three attackers.
By then, I look at my right
and I saw Ignacio already with his skateboard in his hands, jumping
and hitting the terrorist.
[Ultimate Sacrifice: The Story of Ignacio Echeverría]
Well, here are pictures of the family at one time.
In others are my parents. There is my wife when she was young.
Probably that photo corresponds to the date on which Ignacio was born.
When Ignacio was a child, he was very innocent,
he was affectionate, and with many illusions impossible to accomplish.
He invented the reality he wanted to live in.
He started to skate at, I think, like, ten or 11.
For him it was a way to escape when he had problems,
doing whatever he wanted
and also mixing with different people.
So I think that’s a good thing about the skate community,
that there were people from all backgrounds,
and I think because of this he had some really nice relationships.
I like skateboarding a lot
because I hang out with my friends.
He knew a lot of people
because it’s been a long time skating in the same city,
so you end up knowing everyone.
When we met Ignacio,
I think that we realized that he skated in the same way he was.
He was quite a character.
His style of skating was also old school,
very different from ours.
And I remember that trick that nobody could do
was the Impossible.
He always had a trick that nobody could do it.
What do you think?
This is a bit scary.
He always asked us to go skating.
There was an age difference,
he worked and we didn’t,
we had classes,
but he was always younger in spirit.
I met Abo (Ignacio) a long time ago.
We became very good friends
and we were filming in many places in Spain and Madrid,
even in London, when he was living there.
For me, he was like not just one more friend,
he was a brother, practically.
He looked really like, I don’t know, like a gentleman.
He saw some guys harassing some girl.
He tried to defend the girl
because he was just like that, man, he was so brave.
These guys, they showed up at the skatepark and they beat him up.
He didn’t like to see injustice.
I’m Woody the Woodpecker.
For me, what describes him best
is he tried the same trick, like, 25 times.
He didn’t do it properly—ever.
So at the end, he broke his ankle, properly.
It’s exactly how Ignacio was.
Here’s a clip of him at Mile End.
He moved to London in 2012.
He felt like he was part of an English community.
It was important to be immersed in the culture.
He was super happy.
Being in London, he could be properly himself.
He was just always at Mile End,
and we were always at Mile End.
The skatepark is a really friendly place,
so you kind of just assimilate other people into your crew.
And Ignacio was one of the people that we’d always chat to,
and he joined our group that way.
I met Ignacio in London.
He was super chilled, super sweet.
One of those people who wants to know more instead of talking,
always asking and being curious about you and what you do with life.
If he thought that you were having a bad day or anything like that,
he’d text you, sending love your way sort of thing.
It says a lot about someone’s character, I think.
We met up next to Borough Market,
which had volleyball, sand pits.
And Ignacio did his thing, where he skated for a little while...
then busted out his camera and wanted to start filming.
[We were] down at the Tate, then the Millennium Bridge,
then I said, “I’m going home to get food,”
and they went off to Borough Market.
We started to head to London Bridge.
On the way, I saw someone not having a good moment.
He was holding himself like this,
and the people who were surrounding him
were kind of worried as hell.
Their faces were kind of scary, like it was not something normal.
People have described seeing victims being treated on the roadside,
some with knife wounds.
A policeman passed me on my left, running towards the terrorist.
He got knocked out straightaway, like, boom.
They saw that a man was stabbing a girl.
I approached the person who was needing help.
By then, I look at my right,
and I saw Ignacio already with his skateboard in his hands, jumping
and hitting the terrorist.
I started to approach to him.
He fell in front of me and he got stabbed.
The same ones jumped on me straightaway
because I was next to him.
I had a bike here, so I kind of threw it and...
I started to run.
I saw my friend Javi down the road,
shaking, looking at me, like, “What the hell is this?”
I was like, “Man, this is a terror attack.”
We decided to go back to Ignacio.
By then, the terrorists went into Borough Market.
And at that moment we realized that we could actually make it to Ignacio
because they went inside.
By the time we were approaching him, the police came to us like,
“What the hell are you doing here?”
They told us that we had to run towards one direction,
which was in the opposite way to where Ignacio was.
We tried to go back to him. They didn’t let us approach.
I was completely sure that he was alive.
Good morning and welcome to an
to bring you the latest developments on the terror attack
that took place in central London last night.
Six people were killed and at least 48 injured by three attackers,
who, just after ten o’clock, drove a van over London Bridge
aiming at pedestrians
before jumping out and attacking people with knives.
All three attackers were then shot dead by the police.
While switching channels, we saw that there had been an attack,
and my wife tells me that there are too many attacks there,
thinking about our two children who live there,
and that’s it.
Ignacio, that night, was meant to sleep at his sister’s.
And I called him...
and he didn’t reply.
And I called him, called him, called him.
We have a WhatsApp group,
which we use to communicate,
and everyone began to come up,
saying, “Hello, good morning,”
except Ignacio, who didn’t say anything.
Ignacio doesn’t appear.
So I ask, "What happened?”
And they tell me that he might be in church.
I call her, and I explain very, very softly...
that he was involved in the terror attack.
Ignacio doesn’t appear, and as he had been in the attack,
we thought that something must have happened.
Where’s Ignacio? That was the question.
We went hospital by hospital,
asking for him.
No one could tell us anything.
We were hoping that he was alive and that he was in a hospital,
and we were thinking about every possible outcome.
And we just kept waiting
to know what had happened.
[This is our homie Ignacio Echeverría...
we’re still waiting to hear where and how he is...]
[A Madrid man is missing in London...]
[London attack: Spanish “skateboard hero” Echeverría missing]
We sort of maintained some optimism that he might be at the hospital
or just sort of lost his phone and all contact.
But the writing was kind of on the wall,
and we could kind of see that from the next day on, really.
Every second you don’t know anything,
you know that you are closer to the bad news.
It hadn’t been confirmed.
So the police called 72 hours later,
they couldn’t give any response because they weren’t fully aware.
Five days is... it’s a long process, man.
When they told us that Ignacio was dead,
I calmed down because I knew he wasn’t suffering.
He was dead, he wasn’t suffering.
I was positive, thinking that, OK, it was...
but a knife is a knife, you know, and...
it kills you, bro.
We heard about the sad news...
and it still felt, like, unreal.
Like, him, come on. Like, Ignacio?
After a few days, I received the news,
and well...
I had lost a part of me because my adolescence was basically with him.
We just met there and talked about Ignacio and how much we loved him.
We couldn’t believe it. Like, so many questions.
It seems that Ignacio died in the hands of a man
who was a doctor coming out of a café.
He wasn’t on duty.
He didn’t have any of his medical equipment, but he stayed with him,
and Ignacio died in his hands.
They couldn’t stop the bleeding.
In memory of Ignacio,
I’m really sorry that we couldn’t save you.
You gave your life so bravely to save people,
and you will always be remembered as a hero.
[The family of... Ignacio Echeverría have confirmed he was killed...]
[after trying to fend off a terrorist ...and help an injured woman.]
I thought at the beginning that the girl who got stabbed,
she, for sure, got killed.
Fortunately, the girl is alive.
The woman who had been injured that day,
she moved to Australia and wrote to us.
She hadn’t known what had happened until the day of the trial,
but now she knew that Ignacio had saved her life.
Her and her husband’s lives.
He wouldn’t let it happen,
that someone was doing something so wrong,
hurting people.
For me, he was a good person,
and what he did showed exactly that.
Helping that girl who was being attacked, and he had no doubt.
Maybe, in return,
to give his life for that.
If that’s being brave, he was brave.
But I think Ignacio, he was a good man and generous, that’s what he was.
It was hard, man,
for everybody who knew him, because we all knew he was...
the best guy ever.
So, I had this idea that we’re all going to do
this Memorial Skate Day for Ignacio.
It was the same route we did the day that we went out skating.
We kept it purely for that.
The first spot was the playground down in London Bridge,
which is this kind of a playground with some ledges in it
that you’re allowed to skate there.
There was about 30 or 40 of us.
Just was amazing, you know,
people that you don’t know, but everyone’s just jamming,
and everyone was really happy that day.
It was a really positive memorial to him.
Everyone’s just full of cheek and wit with each other.
The security guards come eventually,
and we’re explaining what we’re doing,
and some of them were like, “Actually, that’s really cool.”
I think we went to about six or seven spots all around London Bridge.
He was in our memory for every spot we were in.
We were just going to have as much fun as we could
out of respect for all the courage that he showed.
We were going to just commemorate him on that day.
So we got three boards to commemorate Ignacio.
All of them we basically just took around to the spots that we skate,
especially to Mile End,
and asked everyone to come and sign it
and just give us their messages.
The idea is, at some point I’ll put this up at Mile End
so we can have somewhere that’s sort of framed
and that it can live forever.
We had all three at the memorial for the week,
where the flowers were,
but one of them, we gave to Ignacio’s parents.
And then the last one,
we ended up taking to the graveyard up at Southbank.
Over the river, there’s the place where you throw all your old decks,
so that’s where we went and put the last one for Ignacio,
so he’s up there.
It was just something for us, as the skaters, and how we met him,
to really end the crap that we’d been through
on something so positive.
And now when I think about him, it’s not...
he died at Borough Market in a **** terrorist attack.
He was a skater and a good mate of ours,
and he was lost to unfortunate circumstances.
Last Saturday in London amid the terror,
of a chaos hard to imagine,
[Ignacio] was able to carry out a heroic gesture.
He could have fled, as the majority of us would have done,
but he did not hesitate to jump on one of the terrorists
to defend a woman.
Those people were proud of what this one person had done,
who was a skateboarder.
In the name of Ignacio, and with raised skateboards,
to show, so to speak, our fidelity
and our pride towards Ignacio.
Had he not had his skateboard on him...
he’d have probably done the same thing.
The fact he did have his skateboard on him,
it meant that skaters all around the world
could connect with this guy
in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise.
And the skateboarders who hear this,
they’re like, “Holy ****, this is one of us.”
And you get a connection and a response
from people who really **** care
just because they’re part of the community, too.
Even though I knew that Ignacio passed,
I was not believing it inside that he wasn’t among us.
Now... once you accept it,
you start getting another perception.
I remember him every day, bro.
And I always think, like, when I get pissed off at things
or I get in an angry mood,
I always think, “How would Ignacio react towards this?
What would he say?
What would he tell me if I behave like this?
Would he be telling me off, not to do that?
Or would he be more laughing and enjoying what I’m doing?
A guy, from head to toe, a ten.
He’s an example to follow.
If everyone could be...
half as good as he was,
this world would be a better place.
The Mayor of Las Rozas decided to put a skatepark
just in front of my parents’ house.
It’s super nice and we hear the noise.
I love it. I love to go there and hear the noise.
It doesn’t take away the sadness, I still have it.
I still get emotional from time to time because Ignacio...
he did what he had to.
So that moves me as well,
to think...
that Ignacio
deserves to be proud of himself.
But that is no sorrow.