Killer claims to be ill

[Galatine]

According to the BBC Axel Rudakubana is shouting in court that he is ill.
AIBU to say I couldn’t give a shit!

The jury is still out on that one I’d say. It sounds to me like there may have been a degree of negligence. We may never know the full extent of their culpability.

Why would it be sarcasm? People are confused as to how a minor without a job has money.

Do you not think that Stanley Reiz KC, his barrister, would have secured psychiatric reports if there was something wrong with him ?

there were no psych reports because there was nothing to say.

If it's true the parents phoned the police multiple times (they may themselves have been scared of him) and the police didn't search his room and find all the illegal things that could have jailed him earlier, then they failed those girls.

I still don't understand how this murderer was free to kill those girls after umpteen Prevent referrals / calls to the police and having a huge amount of illegal materials in his room, including poison, yet Allison Pearson had goodness knows how much police resource wasted on her tweet, which she deleted quite quickly. Including two police officers coming to her house. It's utterly insane.

There is negligence and negligence but until there is a requirement to report worries about the behaviour of a family member they have committed no crime (although definitely negligent as parents if not willfully blind / naive.)

Pocket money for a load of knives, machetes and a crossbow and bolts? Must have been very generous. Or stealing that much from his parents without them noticing? And where was he buying them? I think it's really stretching credulity to see this happening with his parents completely in the dark.

Maybe the police did not have grounds for a search. The prevent referral led to bothing because he did not meet their criteria. The police would have needed a reason yo search the parents home with a warrant and we will have to see if there was one. It does not appear so.

Or indeed these items lying around the house without his parents noticing. Not to mention him cooking up the ricin in the kitchen.

Why do people keep blaming his parents? They called the police at least 4 times and fuck all was done. I feel sorry for them left to try to deal with this alone.

From the BBC:
We also know that Lancashire Constabulary had "several" further interactions with the teenager between October 2019 and May 2022 - including four calls from his home address relating to concerns about his behaviour.

Well their victims only had a few hours or maybe a few minutes of awareness before they were murdered, so I don’t have much sympathy for these Japanese murderers. I’m quite unmoved by the fact they face execution with little warning.

Good point.

Do you think this behaviour is ' normal' though, seriously.

Detectives found a cache of weapons inside his home, including a machete, knives, and a set of arrows, as well as items for making ricin.
He had ordered many of the weapons on Amazon using security software to hide his identity, police said, and took possession of two of the knives on 13 July – two weeks before the Southport attack. One is still available on Amazon costing only £1.70.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/21/southport-murderer-bought-weapons-and-ricin-making-equipment-two-years-before-attack

If all the items were similarly cheap - getting the money for that “cache” would have been fairly easy. Even for a 17 year old.

In terms of the prevent referral 'not meeting the criteria' - anti-female violence needs to be one of the criteria. But I bet it isn't.

I also don't really see why just general extreme violence shouldn't 'meet the criteria'. either. If someone's going to commit a terrorist attack and they have lots of manuals describing how to do so, does it really matter if it ascribes to 'one ideology'. Maybe the ideology is senseless killing? So, is that ok thenbecause it's not religious or right wing or whatever? Complete madness. What's the point if it's so useless?

I think people just want somebody to blame.

It would be interesting to see what the police reason was for not taking further action

The parents were probably equally scared of him and thinking where the hell do we go now.

Somebody upthread mentioned mental illness and trauma affecting immigrants and their descendants who have escaped war and genocide. I do think we have to consider that some of the people who claim asylum here were actually part of the reason the countries they have left were so violent and dysfunctional (e.g. the Manchester Arena bomber). We also have to consider whether the problems associated with immigration and asylum (lack of integration, clash of values, etc.) can travel down the generations when parents pass on their attitudes to their children. I do know that a lot of the gang violence in London is linked to people who were born in places such as Sudan, Sierra Leone and Somalia and who have become inured to extreme levels of violence. It's a combination of nihilism and sectarianism which is extremely frightening.

The police are not coming out of this well, nor is 'prevent' which should perhaps be renamed as it certainly didn't 'prevent' those poor girls dying did it - but so much was known it SHOULD have.

No.
but I do believe that some people are just evil. Fred and Rosemary West for example. Pure evil and nobody suggested there was anything wrong with either of them. Or the many Nazis responsible for thr atrocities of the Final Solution.

my opinion is that the random nature of these attacks, meaning they can happen to anyone, makes people so petrified that they find anything to pin the culpability on rather than the fact that some people are just evil and enjoy hurting others.

The judge mentioned the autism in his summing up. He said it didn’t account for what he did - ie he had it but it wasn’t the cause of his actions.

It depends what you mean by ‘normal’. He’s evil, ego-centric and has a massive chip on his shoulder. None of those are MH problems. His actions are thankfully rare but a person doesn’t have to have MH problems to act as he did.

It probably is a criteria. But there was no evidence of any adherance to any terror related ideology. Not even misogyny. So it does not fall under their remit.

Yes agencies cannot deal with general violent crime. Only things that fall within their remit. They investigated and each time found it was not within their remit.

This boy was born in Wales so a moot point.

I also thought the Manchester bombers were born in Manchester.

In that case, I think Amazon have some serious questions to answer. They're supposedly a proper business, it sounds like they were operating like something you'd expect to find on the dark web. I mean, they were really selling machetes and arrows on Amazon. Fucking hell.

The hate and bloodlust on this thread is disgusting.

This is a young man who committed a most horrendous crime, it is right that he be locked away for a long time, as he has been.

However, it is also important to recognise that him and his family were let down over and over again by schools, police, mental health services etc. This tragedy did not need to happen.

Rubbing your hands in glee at the thought that he would be tortured, abused, even killed is so outside of the scope of what it is to be a civilised society, it is beyond words. Making prison sentences longer, conditions harsher, the death penalty - none of these things make society safer.

Norway is safer on every measure than America. In Norway he would have been given a term of 21 years.

Violence and dehumanising criminals makes society more dangerous, not less.

I think with such harrowing, horrific and unthinkable crimes as these, it is human nature to look for someone to blame. And of course there needs to be an investigation into what was missed and what could have been done differently.
I will say though that I work in mental health with the most hard working and caring people imaginable. However we are in an underfunded service which is desperately short-staffed and these wonderful staff burn out (putting pressure on the remaining staff). I liaise with social workers who have enormous and very complex caseloads. The majority come into the job to try to make a difference. They are driven by wanting to help vulnerable people. In my opinion, the problem is not that people are not doing their jobs properly and do not care; it is that tragically the whole system is underfunded and this makes it an impossible job to do. Think how much care workers and support workers earn who often work most closely with vulnerable people… it is an absolute travesty.

I expect he thinks he will be murdered in prison, which is probably correct.