The woman Austin Hemmings died trying to save says he stood in front of her to shield her from a knife-wielding attacker and ordered her to run just moments before he was stabbed to death.

"Who does that? Who dies for someone they don't know?" the woman told the Sunday Star-Times yesterday in her first interview since her September 25 ordeal.

The 26-year-old West Auckland woman, who has name suppression, calls Hemmings her guardian angel and says he stayed calm as he tried to talk to the attacker.

The woman had taken a break from her job at the call centre in a downtown Auckland office block to talk to a male friend on her cellphone when she was approached by a man she recognised as her cousin. She waved at him and he started talking to her. "It was really confrontational, up in my face."

Frightened, she told the friend on the phone to call the police. "I just got frozen and all that came out of my mouth was `Help, can somebody help me?' And there was no one until Austin came."

She said she saw Hemmings, who had just left work, out of the corner of her eye.

"I said, `Excuse me, sir, can you please help me?' He just stood in the middle of myself and [the accused] and just said to him, `What's going on here?' And [the accused] ignored him and said `Get out of the way, it's none of your business'.

"And Austin was like, `I'm sorry, I can't do that, I can't leave you to do what you're doing' sort of thing.

Less than a minute later, Hemmings turned to her.

"All I can remember is him saying, `Run!' And I get to the lift and it's so unreal, you press the elevator and it's not there. I remember thinking, `Are you serious?' And [the accused] was running after me, and I prayed that someone would be in the elevator, and it comes. No one. My heart sank, and I thought, `Is this what it's meant to be'?"

The doors opened. They fought in the lift. "I prayed not to black out ... I pushed him out with all that was left in me."

He fell, got up and ran, and the lift doors closed. They opened again on the floor of her work. "All I remember is our receptionist's eyes wide open. I said, `Call the cops'."

Her nose and lips were bleeding. Her colleagues wiped her down with paper towels before police arrived and took her back down to the street.

She says she asked people if they knew what happened to the man who'd helped her. "No one answered me."

Then she was checked over by an ambulance officer. "I said, `How's that man?' and he stopped for a second and looked at his clipboard and said `Oh, he's dead'.

"I broke down. I'm just crying because I'm like, `Who does that? Who dies for someone that they don't know'?"

She says the enormity of what's happened hasn't hit her. "It feels like I'm watching it, like a horror movie."

A week after Hemmings died, it was her birthday. "You know how people say `I don't want anything, I'm thankful to be alive? Well, that's exactly what I was. It's like God has given me another chance at life."

She met Hemmings' family at their Devonport home the day before the funeral. "I walked into their house and I just felt the warmth and the love that they have.

"They were just reaching out for me and showing they had no animosity towards me ... Meghann [his daughter] shook my hand and gave me a hug, and I just cried. Jenny [his wife] came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder and said, `Do you want to meet Austin?' I was overwhelmed that a family who had lost someone like Austin could be so strong. They're a genuinely lovely, loving family.

"I thanked [Austin]. There were just tears rolling down. He's a really handsome man. I said, `You're quite good-looking, aren't you, mate?' Jenny was giggling. I told Gareth [his son] that his dad truly is a hero. In my eyes there's none like him. If there is, thank God, but I haven't met them."

The accused had an on-again, off-again girlfriend in the same building, but the woman he assaulted doesn't know if that was why he was there. She says she didn't tell him to leave the girlfriend alone, as has been reported.

She's having another week off before returning to work. It'll be hard. "Every time I look out the back it'll just remind me of the 25th of September."