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A man whose head was almost cut off by a drugged-up axe-wielding woman has spoken about surviving the horrific attack at a petrol station.

Ben Rimmer had the axe slammed into his face by Evie Amati - his face is now held together with metal plates he can touch with his skin.

Ben is furious with Amati's prison sentence, four and a half years, and has spoken out in an effort to get that increased on appeal.

Speaking to news.com.au Ben said: “If I hadn’t turned my head at the last minute she would have cut my head in half.”

In horrifying CCTV footage Amati can be seen roaming the aisles of the petrol station armed with the large axe.

After striking up a conversation with Ben near the till she then snaps and swings a crunching blow into his face.

Amati was sentenced to a minimum of four and a half years behind bars, after her lawyer argued her transgender operation caused her immense pain and contributed to her later trying to kill strangers.

Ben said: “She went there to kill. It’s only pure luck that I’m alive and she’s not remorseful. She’s intelligent … calculating.

“She’ll do her time easily and get paroled in mid-2021. It’s played out perfectly for her, perhaps better than she expected.”

Ben has launched a petition on change.org to have Amati’s sentence appealed and kept in prison for at least 10 years.

Ben will spend the rest of his life with four titanium plates in his face, including an orbital plate which moves and which he can feel every time he touches it.

On the night a drugged-up Amati took the 2kg axe she had bought two months earlier, Ben was on his way home when he decided to stop at the Enmore 7-Eleven to buy a pie at 2.20am on Saturday, January 7, 2017.

His life was about to change forever at the hands of Amati who just one hour earlier posted on social media, “One day I am going to kill a lot of people”.

He was getting a pie from the shop fridge, when Amati strolled into the shop carrying the long-handled axe casually.

Amati did a lap of the shop, passing Ben who then queued at the till behind Enmore shop owner Sharon Hacker, who was buying milk.

Amati, at the time, was furious after she stormed out of a failed Tinder date with a woman.

She had just changed her Facebook status to: “Humans are only able to destroy, to hate, so that is what I shall do” and listened to the dark-themed song Flatline by metal band Periphery.

Amati had also just sent a Facebook message to one of the women she was out with on the Tinder date, writing: “Most people deserve to die, I hate people”.

As the CCTV inside the Enmore 7-Eleven shows, Amati did a lap of the aisles before approaching Ben at the cash register.

Amati began talking to him. He touched the axe and then turned away.

He said: “I remember being struck. But I turned at the last minute, otherwise she would have chopped through my head straight through the front of my face.

“I think I must have seen it coming.”

Doctors estimated if he hadn’t turned, the brain injury caused by Amati would have killed him.

“Her aim was to kill people,” he told news.com.au. “It was pure luck no-one was killed.”

Ben wasn’t immediately aware of what had happened other than “it was like a king hit”.

“It didn’t register straight away, it took about 30 seconds,” he said.

“I fell to the ground. I was prone, bleeding profusely.”

Starting to panic that he might bleed out, Ben took off his shirt and "tied it around my head trying to stem it.”

At the time, he was not aware that Amati had also struck Sharon Hacker with her axe in the head.

Ben began vomiting blood because the wounds and fractures in his face inflicted by Amati included a gaping hole in his nose, which sent blood pouring down his throat.

Police and paramedics arrived and Mr Rimmer was told not under any circumstances to swallow the blood. “It was almost impossible,” he remembers.