Official failures may have contributed to last year’s Bondi Junction stabbing rampage, in which six people were killed by a man with a Cooloola Coast link, an inquest into the deaths has been told.
The inquest was told Queensland police had apparently not acted on repeated and urgent pleas from the killer’s parents to have his mental health assessed.
And a doctor had declared the man, Joel Cauchi, a fit and proper person to hold a gun licence.
The inquest also heard of other “missed opportunities,” including a psychiatrist’s decision to leave it to him to decide whether to renew his medication regime, which he had abandoned some time earlier.
Among the victims was former Noosa Osteopath Ashlee Good, 38, whose baby was also critically injured in the Bondi Junction attack.
Ms Good carried her baby to the safety of a nearby store before succumbing to her own multiple wounds.
She has now been recommended for a posthumous award for her valour in the face of her own death.
The inquest was told Cauchi was a diagnosed schizophrenic who had been unmedicated and unsupervised for some years while living in Queensland.
It also heard of Cauchi’s anger when his father confiscated his collection of military-style knives, at the family’s Toowoomba home.
Cauchi’s Gympie region connection was revealed in a social media photo broadcast on national television shortly after the massacre.
The photo shows Cauchi with a hired surf board, on the beach at Double Island Point, with the distinctive Cooloola Sand Mass dunes in the background.
His holiday photos show him in an apparently much more positive state of mind than that shown in video from the massive Bondi Junction Westfields shopping centre, where the killings occurred.
Cauchi also wounded several other people.
Five of the six dead were women, the only man being, Faraz Tahir, a security guard said to have been on his first shift at the shopping centre.
Despite courageous intervention by several shoppers, Cauchi was only stopped when he was shot by senior police officer Amy Scott after, according to witnesses, he ignored her call for him to drop his knife and advanced on her menacingly.
She then immediately began giving first aid to the 40-year-old, unsuccessfully trying to keep him alive.
She and civilian heroes who confronted Cauchi have been lauded around the world.
Cauchi’s parents, who were the first to identify him from televised security footage, said they had no quarrel with Inspector Scott’s actions.
His mother had in 2019 raised concerns with his private psychiatric clinic that he was hearing voices again and believed he was under satanic control.
The inquest was told material on his phone, examined by police after the killings, showed he was “extremely unwell.”
His phone search history reportedly revealed he was “preoccupied with weapons, with violence and with mass killings.”
He had purchased a knife and the next day made a note to call a knife sharpener to confirm “it doesn’t need sharpening for mall use.”
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