Tuesday, July 22 last year began like any other ordinary day for Natasha Thorpe.
It was the end of the school term, and the married mother-of-two was looking forward to the summer holidays when she kissed her two young children goodbye and headed into the office in Preston, Lancashire, where she'd worked as a probation officer for the past eight years.
She'd no idea that, just a few hours later, surgeons would be battling to save her life, and that it would be touch and go whether her nine-year-old son and four-year-old daughter would ever see their mummy again.
Because just after 2.30pm career criminal and paedophile Ryan Gee, 35, walked into their scheduled appointment and, without warning, stabbed the 32-year-old four times, leaving her bleeding and gravely injured.
'You've done f* all for me for two years,' he shouted, before chasing Natasha around the office with two large knives and, what she thought was, a loaded gun.
Natasha, known as Tasha, admits that, in the eight terrifying minutes that followed before armed police arrived, she thought she was 'going to die'.
'I am a mother to two beautiful children and in that moment, the thought of them became my strength,' she says. 'I fought with everything within me, refusing to let an act of cowardly evil take me away from them.'
Thankfully, after two life-saving operations and four weeks in hospital, including two in intensive care, Tasha pulled through and last month Gee was jailed for life for her attempted murder. A judge told him he was 'conspicuously dangerous' and would spend at least 16 years in jail before being eligible for parole.
But the case has thrown the spotlight on the daily risks faced by probation officers and raised questions over whether, at a time when more offenders are being released early to ease pressure on the country's packed prisons, the Government is doing enough to protect them from harm.
Just four months after the attack on Tasha, another probation worker, Cameron Atkinson, in his 20s, was stabbed multiple times at a probation office in Oxford. The alleged perpetrator Nelson Williams, 27, is due to stand trial for attempted murder in April.
Both incidents - thought to be the first knife attacks to take place inside probation offices for some years - prompted a national review of security measures and a recommendation that staff be given access to bleed kits, containing items such as tourniquets and trauma bandages, as well as personal safety training and body-cams, so that meetings with offenders can be recorded for the first time.
Lockers for offenders' bags and belongings, knife arches and handheld metal-detecting wands, which can be used to search people for weapons, have also been approved for pilot schemes in seven selected offices.
But the probation officer's union, Napo (formerly National Association of Probation Officers), is concerned that such attacks are being treated as 'isolated' events by HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) and other serious threats or near misses are not being properly collated, meaning the true scale of the 'worsening' risk faced daily by their members is going undetected.
In the last three months alone, the Daily Mail has learned, seven 'all-staff alerts' - warnings sent to the 6,000 probation officers who supervise around 244,000 offenders across the country - have been issued about seven different male offenders deemed to pose a 'significant risk of harm' to staff.
In the most recent case, the offender emailed a probation office demanding details of a female officer and when asked why he needed them, he replied: ‘I’m going to kill her.’
The offender then sent a further disturbing email, threatening: ‘I will totally enjoy torturing every bit of her life out.’
That matter was reported to police, but Ian Lawrence, general secretary of Napo, said he would be contacting Lord Timpson, the Minister for Prisons and Probation, to re-iterate concerns that such threats are not always recorded formally as health and safety incidents.
A national protocol is also desperately needed to instruct staff on what to do when a high-risk offender arrives at their office, Mr Lawrence said.
'The evidence suggests that HMPPS is perhaps failing to evaluate and understand the totality of risk facing probation staff,' he said. 'Without proper recording and preventative action, serious incidents will continue to be treated as exceptional rather than as foreseeable events. Staff safety must be embedded in health and safety procedures, not addressed retrospectively after harm has occurred.'
For their part, the Ministry of Justice insist violence against probation officers is 'utterly unacceptable' and cite the rolling out of 'tough new security measures at probation sites' as evidence they will 'do whatever it takes to keep staff safe'.
But, given that some violent prisoners are now being freed after serving as little as a third of their sentences, Mr Lawrence said the Government needed to act as a matter of urgency to improve confidence among the already 'over-stretched and fearful' probation workforce.
In Gee's case, Preston Crown Court was told that he had been in trouble with police since the age of 17, accumulating nine previous convictions for 17 different crimes, including motoring offences, criminal damage and indecent exposure.
In July last year he was being supervised by probation services for failing to comply with the requirements of an 18-month suspended sentence, handed down for his most serious transgression - sending obscene photographs of himself performing a sex act to what he believed was a 12-year-old girl (in reality, she was a police officer posing as a child).
At the time of his conviction for that offence, in April 2023, Gee was known as Daniel Godkin but changed his name after his barrister successfully persuaded a judge not to jail him because of mental health issues. (The court heard Gee suffered emotional and sexual abuse as a child and had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, ADHD and also probably has an emotionally unstable personality disorder.)
But despite being given a second chance, Gee failed to stay out of trouble, and over the next 11 months spent time in and out of jail after being convicted of indecent exposure, criminal damage and breaching the terms of his suspended sentence.
On his release, Gee, who was living in a tent, developed an irrational hatred of probation officers, who he blamed for his imprisonment and homelessness.
In the weeks before the attack, he made 'intimate and graphically violent plans' to take his revenge.
He bought two knives and an imitation BB gun, which looked like a real firearm, and even wrote a chilling letter to one female probation worker, blaming her for failing to 'give me any good feedback' and warning: ‘These deaths, you are a part of. You got these killed.’
At 2.30pm, on July 22, an agitated Gee walked into Preston probation office, which is housed on a small trading estate, one mile from the city centre next to the River Ribble, for his meeting with Tasha, and put his plan into action.
Immediately sensing Gee’s anger, she asked her colleague Paul Jones, an accommodation support officer, to sit in on the appointment.
But Mr Jones’s presence didn’t deter Gee.
After complaining no one was helping him, he pulled out the knives and gun from his backpack, before quickly moving towards Tasha and stabbing her forcefully below her left armpit.
As she collapsed in pain, he then turned his attention to Mr Jones, chasing him out of the room and down a corridor. Mr Jones managed to lock himself in a disabled toilet, so Gee ran back towards the reception, where Tasha had gone to seek help.
There, receptionist Louise Catterall tried desperately to protect her, but Gee lunged and stabbed Tasha again, this time in the stomach.
'I remember locking eyes with him as the knife went in,' she says. 'That moment haunts me. My amazing colleague Louise (was) shouting and pleading,''Please don't hurt her, Ryan.''(Her)screams will stay with me forever.'
Ms Catterall stood in the way to stop Gee from stabbing Tasha again and, although seriously hurt, she managed to get to safety behind a secure door.
Meanwhile, another member of staff had activated the office's panic alarm, which immediately alerted police. When armed officers arrived eight minutes later, they were confronted by Gee, who had the gun pointed at Ms Catterall’s head.
She later told police that she thought, ‘this is it,’ put her head down and closed her eyes in preparation to die.
Gee began shouting: ‘Shoot me, just shoot me,’ at the officers, but, fearful Ms Catterall might be injured if they opened fire, officers opted to deploy a Taser instead.
Gee was arrested and his backpack seized. Inside officers found a notebook which detailed his complaints about the probation service, including one note describing them as ‘f*ing useless’.
Tasha, who lost more than four pints of blood, was treated at the scene by paramedics and doctors who'd arrived via air ambulance, before being taken to Royal Preston Hospital.
She suffered four serious stab wounds, including lacerations to her bowel, which has left her with 'permanent and irreversible' injuries. The surgeon who operated on her said she was only alive thanks to the swift action of the emergency services and she will require more surgery in the coming months as she continues to recover.
But, besides the physical scars, Tasha says her 'mind' has also become a 'frightening and terrifying place' because of the psychological harm inflicted by Gee that day.
'I see his face every day, as though I am living in a nightmare I cannot escape,' she says. 'The image of the knives he used to attack me is permanently etched into my mind.
'I am tormented by thoughts of what I could have done differently to lessen the horrific impact.
'The sleepless nights, the flashbacks, and the moments of breaking down have affected me both emotionally and psychologically.'
She remains off work and it's unclear whether she will ever be able to return to the career she loved after what she's been through.
'I no longer feel safe doing the job I dedicated so much of myself to,' she adds. 'The sense of purpose and confidence I once had has been replaced with fear and uncertainty, and I'm left questioning what the future holds for me professionally.'
The couple’s children have also been badly affected.
Their son now sleeps with a toy gun under his pillow ‘to protect his family’ and has had his ‘childhood innocence snatched away from him in one of the cruellest ways,’ James says.
Tasha also feels ‘overwhelming guilt’ about putting her children through the ordeal of seeing her so fragile and close to death in hospital.
She says Gee ‘stole precious time with my children and my family that I will never get back’.
'See(ing) me so vulnerable, hooked up to machines and in a coma, not knowing whether I would survive - they did not deserve to endure that trauma,' she says.
'Gee has taken so much from me. I missed the entire summer holidays, a time that should have been filled with memories. They say you only get 18 summers with your children before they are grown up, and he stole one of mine.
'Instead of time together, my children were begging for me to come home, and I had no way of knowing when -- or even if -- that would happen. I went ten days without seeing or speaking to my children; it was the longest I had ever been apart from them.'
But, despite all the struggles and uncertainty, Tasha remains positive and doesn't want to let what happened ruin her family's future.
'I owe it to them - who have unknowingly carried me through my darkest days - to refuse to let the events of that day define me,' she adds.
'I am determined to rebuild my life.'