Axel Rudakubana

[Dylanxoxo]

I haven't seen anything in articles I have read about Axel Rudakubana today about a mental health assessment. His behaviour is so extreme, that it is difficult not to suspect he is suffering from an untreated mental health condition. Does anyone else think that mental illness may be at the root of his horrific crimes?

Yes to this.

I agree there are questions about the weapons and ricin and wondering how that could go unchecked.

Edit - I don't believe the parents are culpable here but there are questions about some things as above

Are we ever going to know all the facts I wonder.

I would be fascinated to know how a "normal"? little boy grows up to be where we are today.What must that kid have seen or experienced ..blows my mind I just cannot understand it.

In response to the information about the boys who have two ‘carers’ and live apart from their families: I think we have a similar young adult living near us. Unless the weather is terrible, he walks along our lane , accompanied by his two carers, twice a day.

Except that the carers change all the time. Most of them are talking to each other or looking at their phones, they pay little attention to him, he walks either behind or in front of them. Does this matter ? Well, my neighbours were holding a lunch party just after they moved in, they had a lot of people coming ( ‘just drop in ‘) so the door was open. The person in question walked into their house, sat down and started to help himself to the food, then demanded a can of fizzy drink. His behaviour was fairly threatening. The other people at the party were pretty frightened, one of them went out and got the ‘carers’ to persuade him to leave. After this incident, the carers were upped to three, but it’s back to two again now.

Just as in the Tate tragedy, the carers are not doing their job.

The lane is pretty much pedestrianised ( cul de sac) it is used a lot for walks by elderly people, mothers with tiny children etc because it is ‘safe’. Or so we hope. Our door is always locked.

@Allthegoodnamesarechosen the carers are paid very well. The agency our LA uses for these kind of cases pay the carers £52 ph! They were pretty useless when they were living with my friend. Most of the times she was being attacked by her DS they were downstairs with their earbuds in, glued to their devices!
To be honest they're pretty powerless. They can't lay down the law in anyway and don't really have the expertise.
My friend is always shocked by the state of her DS'S room at his solo placement. But the carers are not allowed in his bedroom without his consent in order to clean or tidy up. The same goes for any residential placement.
He still gets to game all night long. Only eats in his room. Won't take his meds. Doesnt go to school. Doesn't engage with anything. Doesn't go out. Has no friends etc.. As I said, it's nothing more than a holding pen until adulthood.

@Reugny I’m not saying we lock up children I’m saying if you have these teenagers over the age of criminal responsibility who cannot possibly be helped into being functioning members of society because they are violent, obsessed with hurting others and do not understand that they are wrong and they can’t have their own way then what do you do with them? This individual did get lots of intervention and extras that most kids don’t get but it made no odds and what we’re actually lamenting is that someone didn’t step in from family, ss, prevent, camhs or the police and stop him through presumably medicating his tendencies away or locking him up due to his previous crimes. We could spend millions on therapy and courses and support but these things only work if the person themselves wants to change.

Alder Hey have confirmed he was under their care for 4 years but stopped engaging with them and their offers of mental health care after 2023.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmn1rxpk4o

By then he'd already been rejected by PREVENT 3 times

And people still say he isn't evil.

I'm so sick of the 'human rights' of evil people always being taken into account but never the innocent victims 'human rights' to live taken into account. Kier Starmer said he won't look at whole life sentences for people under 18 as against their 'human rights' as a child. He was only 9 days short of being 18 and he knew what he was doing. He planned it all. He showed no remorse whatsoever. No human rights even to live for those little girls. The law needs changing to over 16 provided the prosecution can prove they knew what they were doing so premeditated and motivation to murder demonstrated.

The good thing about Broadmoor is that people are detained until they are better. The psychiatrists are obviously selected because of their willingness to never let dangerous nutjobs back into society.

If he ended up in Broadmoor, the minimum term would be irrelevant - it would become a de facto whole life term.

The only problem is that Broadmoor is classed as a hospital, rather than a prison, and conditions are much nicer and I want him to suffer - although the 'patients' are much more likely to chop him up and eat his spleen.

@caringcarer I do wonder if he deliberately committed the crime just before his 18th birthday in an attempt to cheat justice.

Have you got any idea how many people on trials and in prisons have MH issues/illnesses?

Its fairly bog standard, just because its not been a major part of discussion in court doesnt mean anything. He isnt normal by any stretch is he?

If not mentally disordered in some way what would you call it?

The point is the court didn't feel it was his MH or unfit to trial. I personally think he's an evil scumbag, but that's me.

This

I think as a society we need to accept that, this thread and the others on this subject are an example of this

So many posters thinking you can just section someone, or children will be detained or dealt with by youth justice and it will 'fix' things, or there will be some sort of magic intervention

There isnt much that can be done. Youth justice teams work very hard not to criminalise children, crime after crime after crime gets dealt with by NFA or at most some sort of toothless referral order.
There is no therapy you can 'force' on someone even if it existed and we dont have effective MH systems for children or adults
Hospital teams work hard not to hospitalise people with ASD because it is said to be traumatic for them
Prevent work with specific terrorism and no, just wanting to harm people, even if specifically targeted at women, is not terrorism as such, and in any case as I said earlier or on another thread (Ive lost track), they also cant force someone to work with them

What is it people will accept as a solution to people like this? Most parents dont want their kids locked up or punished on the basis of 'they might' do something.

I think he did. He shouldn't have been allowed to cheat the system in this way. The judge said had he been just 9 days older he would have issued whole life sentence.

Yes, not uncommon, the public dont really know about this sort of thing. The children will be probably subject to DOLs, which is reviewed by a court and not always agreed

YOu have to be lucky to find staff to work with people like this, they risk getting attacked but also the children making allegations about the staff so that it prevents staff restraining them.

Also you can lock doors and windows and restrict internet use or phone use but ultimately some young people will just cause criminal damage, attack staff, smash a window and get out

After a while the appetite for the DOLs dwindles when its not seen as being effective,w hat is the point of depriving the liberty when its not doing its job

At adulthood its not likely any DOLs will continue, its problematic post 17 anyway, so these kids will be out in the community, they dont have to comply with anything.

I don’t know what to call it because I don’t know what the word is for such acts. But I do know that he’s been assessed and he’s been deemed to be of sound mind hence his guilty plea was accepted and no mitigation was offered as a defence. Sometimes there aren’t words for what people are it’s just an aberration. It makes the rest of us more comfortable to label people who behave in ways we can’t fully comprehend it distances us from their depravity to pop it in an box far away from us.

Am I not right in thinking that 52 years is still close to being a whole life sentence? Okay, unfortunately, he could still theoretically get out aged 70, but somehow I doubt it. Prisoners generally die significantly earlier than members of the general public.

Unfortunately, I don't think this case could have been prevented. Some people are just evil. It would be comforting to think that somehow the right treatment or intervention could fix someone who wanted to commit violent crimes, but sometimes people are just plain evil, but otherwise of sound mind.

In the past some people were sectioned and locked away unfairly and incorrectly, which was wrong. Correcting this by permission being sought from the individual first before anything is state actioned, is not the solution. As seems usual, to right a wrong the pendulum swings too far the other way.

Bring back asylums - can the country afford this when there is no rehabilitation potential

Rubbish, children and adults like this were institutionalised and then everyone got upset at locking people away who hadnt done anything and then conveniently the government of the day invented 'care in the community' which just so happened to cost less at source (forget the rising cost of hospital admissions, police time and social services interventions)

And in the climate of an ever increasing call to have children who would have been in specialist provisions previously, now in mainstream provisions/schools, this is what it has come to.

This romantic view that other prisoners are salt of the earth types ready to do rough justice is so bizarre. The other prisoners are likely murderers and rapists themselves and will be looking out for themselves.

You don’t have to consent to assessment to be diagnosed under these sorts of circumstances

It doesnt absolve him of responsbility to say he isnt right in the head does it?

And while that may be a very non medical and non professional way of describing someone who isnt...erm... right in the head, thats what he is isnt it?

If you're a MH practitioner you will have learned in your studies how fluid and changable thinking around what an illness is or what a disorder is or what can be called an illness and disorder and how regularly the manuals change and will continue to change. As another poster said the whole concept of criminally insane is problematic when we're talking about someone like this. And even when we're talking about most people who are in prison the vast vast majority have MH illnesses/disorders but are not considered in any way different or special in terms of prison need, ie they are not in hospital. Just like this bloke wont be, unless he needs to be

And Im interested in the tone of discussion on this forum in particular in any case that he certainly doesnt have any MH illness because the report said so, or the report wasnt even there so it must be, when normally posters on any other thread about an 18 year old are chomping at the bit to emphasise that the said 18 year old's brain is not yet developed and wont be until they're 25 and therefore they are less responsible or not able to make the right choices blah blah blah

Very different on this thread

I think you might be reading into it, things that arent really there

He had tried apparently go on sprees like this before hadnt he, the father stopping him from going out one time, Im not sure the timing has any relevance to his planning about how old he was, he had been building up to this or wanting to hurt people for years, all his teen years. I wouldnt have thought he could give a stuff to the consequences, people like this dont care about the consequences.

Additionally you seem to be assuming that someone who is in psychosis has no awareness of what they are doing so cant make a choice to a) attack gym goers b) attack a dance class,

Theres no evidence he was experiencing psychosis at the time of the murders, Im just correcting your assumption about how psychosis works