Coroner’s call to prevent ‘senseless’ youth knife crime

Better social cohesion and a wider community response to rising youth violence is needed five years after the “senseless” fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old boy, a coroner has said.

Victorian coroner Ingrid Giles delivered her findings into the 2020 death of Solomone Taufe’ulungaki on Thursday.

Following days of fights between the two gangs, on June 16, 2020, 15-year-old Solomone was dragged to the ground and hit with a baseball bat in the Brimbank Shopping Center car park in Melbourne’s west.

He died after one of the boys, who was 15 at the time, stabbed him in the chest and pierced his heart.

The young man who inflicted the fatal wound was sentenced to two years in prison in February 2023 after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

Ms Giles said the murder was a “tremendous tragedy” and a “senseless and preventable act of violence”.

He also noted that Victoria was “still grappling with the impacts of knife crime and youth crime” more than five years later.

His finding comes nearly six weeks after the alleged murders of 15-year-old Dau Akueng and 12-year-old Chol Achiek, who were stabbed while walking home from a basketball game.

“The evidence before me shows that youth knife crime – like all youth crime – represents a complex problem arising from a wide range of socio-economic factors and affecting marginalized groups at a disproportionate rate,” he said.

“In this sense, the responsibility to prevent further deaths from knife attacks in young people requires a response from the whole of society that addresses the reasons why such crimes are committed in the first place.”

He said police and justice responses to youth crime “should not be pursued in isolation” and called for an approach that goes beyond law and order.

This includes supporting early intervention and community reintegration initiatives to address the root causes of knife crime through improving social cohesion, participation and community-based responses for at-risk young people.

Ms Giles said socio-economically vulnerable young people were disproportionately represented as both offenders and victims of youth knife crime and highlighted the need for multicultural young people to be given the same educational and vocational opportunities as others.

“The social cohesion and inclusion heralded by the whole-of-society response to youth crime – elevating the voices of affected young people – is the clearest path to safer long-term outcomes for Victorian communities,” he said.

“In this context, it is worth noting that the majority of people from immigrant communities are not involved in crime or violence and are simply focused on making a new life for themselves in Australia.”

He noted that Australia is one of the world’s most multicultural countries and that 30 per cent of Australians were born abroad in 2020, the year Solomone died.

He called on the Victorian government, Victoria Police and Youth Justice to collaborate with community groups to ensure they can co-ordinate their criminal response to youth knife crime and align them with evidence-based community initiatives.

“While appropriate police and justice responses are critical, relying solely on ‘law and order’ responses to youth crime can run the risk of further criminalizing already marginalized groups of young people and in doing so may cause further harm in both the short and long term,” Ms Giles said.

“By now recognizing the importance of a whole-of-community approach, I hope Victoria can see a reduction in youth crime in the future and in doing so prevent future deaths in similar situations.”