Video reveals shopping mall killer’s fight for knives
Adelaide Lang and Miklos Bolza |
A man who was suffering psychotic symptoms when he stabbed 16 people in a busy shopping centre had a fixation for knives, according to a police officer who interacted with him a year earlier.
Previously unreleased footage has revealed the moment in January 2023 when Joel Cauchi complained to Queensland Police that his father confiscated his collection of military knives.
“My dad has taken some of my property,” he tells police while standing outside his parents’ Toowoomba home.
“It’s pretty expensive and he won’t give it back.”
During the interaction, which was filmed on an officer’s body-worn camera, he was calm and collected as he told police he couldn’t afford to replace the military knives.
The collection included a knife that was the exact type used in the Bondi Junction mall attack a year later, an inquest into the stabbings was previously told.
In a transcript of the full interaction, Cauchi persistently urged officers to get the knives back from his father and suggested he would become broke and homeless without them.
Senior Constable Matthew McDonnell told his colleague that Cauchi had a “hard-on” for knives which had triggered the aggressive family argument reported to police.
Cauchi’s mother told officers her husband had taken the knives out of concern for their son, who she believed was hearing voices after he stopped taking his schizophrenia medication.
He had been “raging”, had “laid hands” on his father and sworn at his mother after the knives were taken and given to a friend for safekeeping, the officers were told.
But when he was asked by police about his mental health, Cauchi told them he had ceased taking his medication and he felt “terrific”.
He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen and successfully treated for decades through anti-psychotic medication and psychiatric visits before he disengaged in 2020.
A year after the confrontation with his father over his knife collection, Cauchi armed himself with a 30-centimetre pigging knife and launched an unprovoked attack at the Bondi Junction mall in Sydney.
The 40-year-old was “floridly psychotic” when he killed six people and injured 10 others – including a nine-month-old baby – on the afternoon of April 13, 2024.
On Wednesday, the shopping centre’s retail managerJoel Gaerlan told the inquest the first radio broadcast from a distressed security guard came through at 3.33pm.
“Code black, code black, alpha, there’s lots of blood, you need to hurry,” he recalled her saying.
The call sparked confusion and he had been heading to verify what was unfolding when he received the first clear radio call confirming it was an active armed offender situation.
Mr Gaerlan said the radio traffic was congested with a “constant stream of messages” and it was difficult to transmit messages during the spree.
After receiving confirmation of the attack, he radioed the centre’s control centre to contact police, make an announcement over the public address system and display an emergency warning on the digital screens.
The inquest was told announcements were not broadcast throughout the centre until 3.52pm – 14 minutes after Cauchi was shot dead by NSW Police Inspector Amy Scott.
Mr Gaerlan was “immensely frustrated” about the lack of information surrounding the attack and despite being trained on active armed offender scenarios 11 days before the stabbings, he said he had never faced anything like the mass casualty event.
“I was terrified,” Mr Gaerlan said.
“I was doing the best I could with the information I had coming through various sources at the time.”
Dawn Singleton, 25, Ashlee Good, 38, Jade Young, 47, Pikria Darchia, 55, Yixuan Cheng, 27 and security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, were killed.
Six minutes later, Cauchi was shot dead by NSW Police Inspector Amy Scott.
An inquest into the attack is canvassing a number of issues, including whether there were opportunities for intervention before the fatal attack.
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AAP
