Home invasions by youths carrying melee weapons such as knives, axes and machetes is becoming common In Australian cities. What is different today is that the youths are quite ready to use the weapons, as the attack upon rugby star Toutai Kefu and his family have indicated. The attack occurred at 3 am in the morning, and the attackers were not concerned about people being home, being willing to fight, stabbing, slashing and chopping the entire family.
Clearly, people will need to move to the South African mode of living, by hardening homes, and not leaving signs of affluence visible from the street. It is not perfect, but a hardened home, which cannot be easily broken into, gives time to ring the police, and get ready. And what if the police cannot get there in time, or one lives out in the more rural areas, where you are essentially on one’s own? It would be nice to have a right to self-defence, wouldn’t it?
“There’s one thing that can be said with certainty about the Kefu family’s ordeal this week: the axe, knife and machete-wielding youths who confronted them in the dead of night chose the wrong home to invade in a well-to-do corner of Brisbane’s southside.
Toutai Kefu, the iron-sided former rugby union international who played 60 tests for the Wallabies, didn’t take a step back after his wife disturbed the alleged intruders. He was stabbed in the stomach in the bloody melee in which Rachel and their two adult children were also injured. Thankfully, all four are now on the mend.
Monday’s attack generated international headlines, given 47-year-old Kefu’s standing as one of Australian rugby’s legendary enforcers, the hard man everyone wanted on their side in his playing days. Yet what had people shaking their heads in the leafy streets rolling back from the house on Buena Vista Avenue, Coorparoo, was not only the savagery of the attempted robbery but a deeply unnerving recognition this was no one-off.
For months, the quiet neighbourhood had been targeted by increasingly aggressive young thugs employing a strikingly similar MO. Clad in hoodies, they came tooled up with attitude and bladed weapons.
More worryingly, they seemed all too ready to flick the switch to violence. The old adage that criminals prefer the easy mark of unoccupied premises went out the door alongside the Kefu family’s wellbeing. The raiders had no qualms about breaking in when they were home. Says one shaken local: “We woke up and our suburb was like a war zone. It was surreal, we still can’t believe it.”
Worlds colliding
This is a story of worlds colliding, of ordered, well-tended lives being upended by a brutal 3am intrusion, and kids who grow into troubled teens on the social fringe, a law unto themselves as they graduate from petty offending into car theft and potentially lethal crime.
It would be comforting to think there was a degree of rhyme or reason to what happened to the Kefu family, but the chilling reality is there was not.
“We have no evidence to suggest it was personal to them,” says Tony Fleming, the veteran detective superintendent overseeing the police investigation into the home invasion. “But that in itself is scary, isn’t it?”
Police believe the family was targeted because there happened to be an assortment of new-looking SUVs parked in the driveway. For the accused offenders, four boys aged 13 to 15, the night is alleged to have unspooled in typically chaotic fashion. It began with an alleged break-in at Flinders Crescent, Forest Lake, on the city’s southwestern outskirts, where a Hyundai four-wheel-drive was reported stolen at 2.15am. A woman who challenged them was allegedly knocked to the ground.
By 3.15am police were being called to the Kefu address in Coorparoo, 30 minutes away at legal driving speeds. Woken in their first-floor bedroom by a noise, Rachel encountered two intruders at the bottom of the internal stairs. Kefu, alerted by her cry of shock, rushed to her side. What police allege to have been a “brutal and violent” all-in between the unarmed family and attackers allegedly brandishing knives, an axe and a machete, transpired as Kefu fought them off.
Their 21-year-old son, Josh, went into “beast mode”, the rugby great said on Friday, wiping tears from his eyes. “I had the two intruders on me and he just jumped in with no fear and he copped a couple of hacks to his back,” Kefu explained. Rachel received severe injuries to an arm, and doctors have told her she might not regain full use of the limb, while their 18-year-old daughter, Madi, was cut on a hand and arm after she joined the melee. Kefu said the floor was awash in blood, making his and the children’s injuries look worse than they were.
A neighbour identified in media reports this week as real estate agent Ben Cannon, a cousin of Kefu’s Wallabies teammate and fellow forward Brendan Cannon, intervened at the decisive moment to tackle one of the teenagers, allegedly still armed with a knife. The others allegedly sped off in the stolen Hyundai and were picked up by police in the succeeding days, one of them after turning up at hospital.
They have been charged with a range of offences, including four counts of attempted murder, three counts of assault causing grievous bodily harm, unlawful use of a motor vehicle, breaking and entering, burglary and deprivation of liberty. With three of the defendants aged 15 and the fourth just 13, media have been barred from covering the Children’s Court proceedings to date. But that has not stopped the state opposition and police union having their say.
Car-related youth crime is a hot-button political issue in Queensland, given added urgency by the deaths in January of Brisbane couple Matthew Field and six-months pregnant Kate Leadbetter, mowed down while walking their dogs in suburban Alexandra Hills. A 17-year-old who was allegedly drug-affected at the wheel of a stolen four-wheel-drive was on Wednesday committed to stand trial for their murder. His lawyer, Ruth O’Gorman, told the Children’s Court the youth accepted his “manner of driving” caused the tragedy but disputed he was aware of this at the time.
Liberal National Party leader David Crisafulli went after the state government for failing to put into effect plans to compel 16 and 17-year-olds to wear GPS trackers as a bail condition, part of the heavily hyped “crackdown” on youth crime launched after the expectant parents were killed.
“I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the fact many Queenslanders no longer feel safe in their neighbourhoods and homes,” he said, referencing the Kefus’ trauma. But Police Minister Mark Ryan insists changes to the presumption against bail for offenders posing a community risk is the key reform, and is working.
Queensland Police Union boss Ian Leavers stirred the pot by revealing that Coorparoo was one of a number of suburbs that was unpatrolled at the time of the attack, after the night duty crew at the local station had called in sick. This was rejected by assistant commissioner David Swan, who said 39 police were in close proximity, with a unit on the scene within six minutes of the first Triple-0 call being made.
Night terrors
This is cold comfort to the Kefus and their neighbours, who have been exposed to equally acute night terrors. As we report in the news pages, the events of Sunday, August 1-2, in nearby Newman Avenue were eerily prescient. Lisa, 60, and her two adult sons, James, 25, and Nick, 23, and James’s girlfriend were jolted awake about 1am. The two young men confronted three youths on the internal staircase. One of them, brandishing an axe, told James: “C’mon bro”, a menacing challenge. “I think they were looking for a fight,” he says.
Another intruder was armed with a hammer; they backed away and Nick, a carpenter, speared off to grab a golf club while James followed them outside. The youths, seemingly in their late teens – though it was hard to say for sure when their hoodies were drawn – belted down one side of the house and he went the other way, converging at the front gate. There, the boy with the axe turned on him, swinging viciously. His heart pounding, the electrician jumped the shoulder-high fence to save himself. “I thought at first the weapons were for intimidation,” he says. “But they kept coming at us.” Lisa suspects the thieves were attracted by the four vehicles parked outside the house, including her tradie sons’ four-wheel-drives loaded with valuable tools.
Another home was broken into a few doors along, where keys were stolen while the occupants, a former lawyer and his wife, slept. A local crime watch page on Facebook details incident after incident – smash and grabs with similar characteristics, carried out by teams of three to five outside teens looking to steal cars.
Lisa says she has lived in Newman Avenue for seven years, and nothing like this has ever happened. Like Buena Vista Avenue, where the Kefus have been since 2005, enmeshing themselves in the community, it’s an elevated street of gracious Queenslanders and expansive homes which command seven-figure prices commensurate with the city views.
Some residents wonder whether there is an organised hand behind the wave of youth crime, dropping gang members into the suburb to break into homes, find keys and take the cars for black market disposal.
Thrill crime
In a way, it’s an appealing theory because it would suggest there is some method to the madness. On the night Lisa’s home was invaded, seven other break-ins were documented on the Coorparoo community site. However, Fleming says the only common factors are the age of the offenders, a preference for stealing high-end SUVs and performance cars and the brazenness of what amounts to thrill crime.
“These are people stealing cars with the intent of committing more crime,” he says. “They will drive dangerously. Some of them will ram police cars, some of them will try to create havoc on the streets to try to generate police attention. They will use these cars as a means of transport to break into other houses to steal other cars, and then steal other property.
“How common is it that these cars are getting stolen for other crimes?” asks Fleming, the crime co-ordinator responsible for the Brisbane police region and its 1.65 million residents. “Every single day. The poor Kefu family is an extreme example of that. It’s not a common example. That is rare. But it did happen and I don’t think any of us haven’t reflected on our own safety as a result of that.”
He points to crime data showing that a hard core of repeat offenders is responsible for most of the trouble. “Of those who will offend, 85 per cent (receive) two cautions … we don’t see them again,” Fleming says.
There’s then a subgroup who are more resilient and require intervention programs intended to help them, he says. Beyond those, there’s the even smaller group of recidivists committing the bulk of crimes. “The numbers vary from year to year, but roughly you’re talking 10 per cent of your offending cohort commit 44 per cent of your offences … who disproportionately commit harm to the community.”
So why is Coorparoo and adjoining Camp Hill suddenly in the firing line? The policeman can’t say for certain. There is an element of organisation in some locality-centric youth gangs such as the so-called Southside group, whose members last year posed in photographs with the stolen Mercedes Benz of Brisbane Lions AFL star Charlie Cameron, tagging him in an Instagram post. The rival Northside gang is notorious for targeting wealthy suburbs such as Hamilton and Ascot on the other side of Brisbane River.
Yet Fleming says there are no neat answers. The hard core of offenders covers kids of Anglo Saxon descent, as well as those with African, Pacifica or Middle Eastern background, who hail from both good and challenged homes, he says.
They range across Brisbane, but when they find an inviting target they make the most of it.
“It’s like going fishing,” Fleming tells Inquirer. “If the fish are biting in a particular area and you’re starting to have success, you’re going to stay in that area.”
Some might want to see an American response to the same sort of problem by master Matt Pasquinilli, following similar attacks in the US, not that anything like this could be recommended for retrained Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT8Eja86b2U