Should the parents of the Southport Killer face civil or even criminal action?

[mids2019]

Listening to the news I do wonder if the parental decisions of the Southport Killer reach a point where they need to face some sort of accountability. I understand that the parents aren't to blame but potentially they could have acted to stop their son and is there not some sort of sanction for this?

Charming family.

‘we should protect our son’ texted daddy to mummy as he watched their beloved boy leave the house with machetes to slaughter little girls.

Not quite sure which generation’s weirder.

As to parents’ culpability? On one hand, reluctance to accept you birthed a monster is understandable; on the other, wtf.

I can’t but feel sorry for them. They were likely suspicious of authority having lived through a genocide: they made bad decisions but they didn’t seem to activity feed him extremism.

It’s a terrible thing to even think about but I would rather my child was murdered than face up to the fact that my child was a monster. I think living with this for the rest of their lives is punishment anyway.

Absolutely not, they will live the rest of their lives wondering if they could have done more.

Rubbish analogy. AK was a minor and as such his parent’s had full responsibility for him.

They knew he was buying weapons, had found them in his room. They should have taken them to the police station not least to prosecute whoever was selling them to a minor (ah but it seems like they may have signed for them at delivery so on sticky ground there).

They knew he had been caught on a bus with a knife and stated to police that he wanted to stab somebody prior to this.

They had sufficient concern to prevent him from going out the previous week.

The morning of the attack, they knew he’d left the house without saying anything after a year of not going out and after preventing him leaving the week before. Why no concern then despite knowing he’d previously gone out with a knife and the father saying he immediately feared his son had carried out the knife attack when he heard about it, so they obviously knew he was a danger to others. Why didn’t they call police and say they had concerns which, is what they should have done, or gone after him. Police could have put a call out to taxi firms and intercepted him. There was a minimum 15 minute window to stop him and save those poor little girls.

Why did his mother try to prevent information about her son being known to support workers? Why is she denying things her husband and other son said she knew about in their evidence?

They knew he was a danger, had weapons and wanted to kill.

They enabled him to carry out his (no words worthy of the evil) crime through their silence and so are complicit.

The facts are pure Farage food, unfortunately.

The dad was one of the Rwandan genocide’s perpetrators, not a victim. Say the broadsheets.

The parents were supposed to have gone home to Rwanda when their asylum checks revealed who they were (refuge can’t be granted to aggressors or war criminals). But they stayed and made a good life with the kids.

Will anyone pause to point out even war criminals don’t usually get bad luck like this with their DC?

Of course not.

It makes me so angry when people say this, often in context to children being killed by their parents either accidentally or deliberately. The child was a person in their own right and deserves justice, not just the parent who killed them having it on their conscience

The parents of the children murdered by this monster will live with the loss of their children for the rest of their lives knowing they were absolutely terrified and in pain in their last moments. The other kids and the staff attacked will be traumatised for life. The emergency services and people who helped stop him will be affected for life.

AK’s parents have a son in prison for doing that to them, they enabled him, feeling bad about that is not punishment.

The dad was one of the Rwandan genocide’s perpetrators, not a victim. Say the broadsheets

I can't see any broadsheets, or any other media, reporting this. Sorry if I've missed it! Please can you post your sources, @Supersimkin7

No.

I do think parents should be accountable for outcomes. If nothing else, we should not pay full state pensions to people who produce criminals, deadbeat parents and other useless citizens. Let them pay back what they received in terms of child benefit, health care, education for their kids, etc.

Don’t know about criminal liability but it’s one hell if a parenting fail, no matter how challenging their child is. I can’t imagine taking delivery of a machete and handing it over or just leaving a stockpile of weapons you know are under a bed. That’s bizarre behaviour in itself.

I can’t understand how they knew he had access to a cache of weapons and did nothing about it.

I would instinctively say no but on the facts of this case yes. It was reasonably foreseeable that he would do something horrific.

Yes. Potential criminal liability should be assessed by the CPS given the truly shocking content of their statements to the enquiry.

Those statements reveal they knew AR was stockpiling an arsenal of murderous weapons & actually saw those weapons; that they knew he was deep in psychosis, highly aggressive, violent, uncontrollable, & filled with hate towards members of the public; & that they knew that shortly before the Southport attacks he had attempted to take a taxi to attack his former school. And yet they concealed all this because they believed revealing it would mean he was taken away.

His mother made a ‘zip it’ sign to prevent relevant information being given to a social worker.

They saw AR leave the house on the day of the attack, knowing he was a risk & might have a weapon, knowing that in the previous two years he’d only left the house on one occasion, that being to try to launch an attack on his school (that’s why as soon as soon as his father heard of the Southport attack he knew it was his son) & yet did not bother to follow him to see him get in a taxi round the corner.

Their statements are horrifying.

These were not parents trying desperately to get help for their son. They were - by the father’s own account - parents concealing the risk their son posed to society. Maybe the criminal law does not permit accountability for this (I have no idea whether any of the inchoate offences would cover it) but it should.

It's a difficult line to walk. People can already be prosecuted for failure to report information that leads to a crime but maybe what that information is needs review.

According to various reports, it wasn't just the parents but also a number of institutions and authorities involved in the killer's life that failed him. In fact his dad, like any parent, had his biggest fear realized of losing his child to a mental healthcare system or prison, which is why he was afraid to say anything. Any parent worth their salt will do whatever they can to protect their children, but unfortunately they are never taught how to protect them by teaching them the consequences of their actions before something devastating ever happens before it's too late. Can you also imagine the fear those parents lived with also, whether they may not wake up the next day living with him, whether or not they said the wrong thing to him and he attempted to kill him? Imagine putting yourself in their shoes, and ask yourself what you would have done differently and at what moment in time you said it's time you turn your back on you child? What he did was heinous and vile, but they have to live with his mistakes until they die and there's no running away from that either.

Have you been under a rock, the question is asked every single time, right back to James Bulger's killers, there are children who kill, more often than not they are 'white' children whatever you mean by that.

The Edlington torturers , the killers of Brianna Ghey, the Bulger killers, the list is endless

Is there a link to this? Where is everyone getting this information

This changes my view of them considerably if this is the case, I had felt very sorry for them previously.

This is like saying that the spouses of abusive partners who stay whilst their children are exposed to abuse thus massively increasing the likelihood of the children developing various mental health problems and becoming abusers themselves should also be held culpable…
it’s not like his parents wanted this to happen.

Yawn

What does need to happen is that there should be a serious case review where all the professionals involved in this persons life, from school to social workers to GPs, looks at what went so badly wrong for this family. Laying all the blame for his actions at the parent’s door won’t change a single thing.

i think it was a good thing that the parents of the girls were able to face the parents -

No: Let’s stick to trial by social media by a bunch of people basing their opinion on a half page article in the papers.

What about parents of teens who get behind the wheel of their new car the parents bought them at 18 and have a crash, killing the passenger? Who’s responsible in that instance? Because it’s more common than what happened in Southport, and we all know how dangerous it can be when teens get behind the wheel of a new car.

Yes there was a case recently where the parent had bought their son a gun and were convicted