For three months earlier this year, the five people responsible for – or party to – the brutal murder of a young, innocent boy sat alongside each other in the dock of the Supreme Court of WA, not making eye contact.
Their friendship all but dissolved after they each pointed the blame at each other over the involvement in the brutal killing of an innocent child.
But 3½ years on, they are bound by a common purpose. Once friends who, over the space of a few days, high on aggression, family loyalty and drugs, decided they were entitled to take the law into their own hands, trawling the streets looking for children to brutally assault.
Mitchell Forth, Jack Brearley and Brodie Palmer captured on CCTV on the day of Cassius’ death.Credit: 9News Perth
In handing down his sentence on Friday, Chief Justice Peter Quinlan spoke of his concern that violence was so “normalised” and “commonplace” in the eastern Perth suburbs of Swan View, Middle Swan and surrounds that the children who lived there thought little of it.
Teenagers wandering the streets in groups, looking for a fight to watch for fun. Boys arranging confrontations to settle scores over days-long romances from school. And the solid belief that if someone slights you, they have to pay. With violence.
A low socio-economic community, at times racially divided, where drugs and weapons are easily available.
But the “mitigating circumstances” – as they’re called in court – as to how a boy full of promise and good came to be so violently and pointlessly killed, go deeper than the criminals’ thirst for a thug life.
It also has a lot to do with their childhoods.
“It would be very easy for me to simply say that you are monsters and ignore your personal circumstances,” Quinlan said during the sentencing on Friday.
“The truth, however is that you are not monsters. The awful truth is you are human beings, with your own life history, who have committed horrendous crimes.
“Until we as a community accept that people who commit horrendous crimes like yours are fellow human beings and not monsters, we will have little hope in preventing such crimes from happening again and again.”
Grabbing young boys off the street, threatening them with knives, kidnapping them, robbing them, beating them violently. Believing – wrongly – their victims had done something they needed to be punished for. In truth, all were completely innocent.
Ethan Mackenzie was just 18 years old when he tagged along for the ride with ringleaders Jack Brearley and his girlfriend Aleesha Gilmore, along with their friend Mitchell Forth, and decided to beat an innocent child and threaten him with a large knife.
It was “disgraceful behaviour”, Quinlan said on Friday.
But the judge went on to explain Mackenzie’s horrific backstory. Born in the back of an ambulance while his mother was high on drugs, he had methamphetamine in his system from his first breath.
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Mackenzie’s mother then “introduced” him to drugs as a child, the court was told. And by the time he was about 12 years old, he dropped out of school to sell drugs for a living.
“You were exposed to violence and drug use by your mother, and other deprivation such as homelessness and lack of schooling,” Quinlan said.
“You also started using a variety of different drugs yourself from a young age, you started smoking cannabis at age 12, and moved on to opiates and benzodiazepines, mainly Xanax, of which you would consume 10 or more pills a day.
“You also use hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and DMT, as well as ecstasy and lean made from prescription grade cough medicines containing codeine and promethazine.”
Gilmore had a similar childhood. While a jury acquitted her of any involvement in Cassius’ death, she was still a part of the surrounding melee, and was convicted over her involvement in the series of assaults and kidnappings on separate boys in the days before Cassius was killed.
Quinlan called her “the driving force”.
But like Mackenzie, she also grew up in a household where drugs and violence were the norm, her mother described as an addict who was neglectful towards her three children.
Gilmore and her two younger brothers were placed into the care of her father but, as he was a single parent working night shifts, she took on the household responsibilities of making meals, preparing lunches, and doing laundry in a pseudo-parent role at 10 years old.
“At 13 years old, you became tired of, quote, ‘playing the mother’ and returned to leave with your mother and grandmother,” Quinlan said on Friday.
“It was within this home that you witnessed your mother’s drug use, domestic violence between your mother and her partner, as well as other random people within the house using drugs.”
It was then Gilmore’s mother “introduced” her to meth. Quinlan’s assessment of Christina McGowan was scathing.
“I don’t need a psychological report to know that your mother would have had a terrible effect on your upbringing, Miss Gilmore,” he said.
Aleesha Gilmore was found innocent of murder, but convicted over her involvement in other crimes in the days earlier.Credit: 9 News Perth
“I saw her give evidence in the trial, and I saw first hand the disgraceful way which she treated your little brother in the CCTV footage that was tended to trial.”
Gilmore went through a period of stability after she moved to Newman with her grandmother but, forced back to Perth, began a “volatile” relationship with Brearley and fell back into drug use “which Mr Brearley supplied”, Quinlan said.
She also fell back into the role of caring for her brothers despite being “completely ill-equipped to deal with their issues”.
But she became fiercely protective of them – which drove her actions in the days surrounding Cassius’ death.
In contrast, Brearley’s past was not nearly as dysfunctional.
He grew up in Kalamunda and had a talent for motocross, even competing at a national level.
But his parents’ separation at the age of 15, which resulted in his mother cutting off contact with her children, played a part in Brearley’s offending, Quinlan said.
He turned to drugs, at 16 smoking cannabis and later getting into alcohol and ecstasy, cocaine, hallucinogens, nitrous oxide bulbs and methamphetamine.
It was also alluded to that Brearley took on a father-like role to Gilmore’s younger siblings while they lived together, as she performed the role of mother.
It was again a misguided attempt at protecting the boys that instigated the chain of events that resulted in Cassius’ murder.
Unlike the others, Mitchell Forth and Brodie Palmer – the oldest of the group – did not have dysfunctional childhoods that could be pointed to in a bid to explain their behaviour.
Forth, in particular, had an idyllic childhood with a Christian private school education and a father who owned a business and gave him a job.
As Quinlan said on Friday: “You are old enough, smart enough, and brought up to know better.”
But out of the group, he appeared to be the only offender who showed true remorse for his actions.
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The same could not be said for Palmer, who according to Quinlan remained “in complete denial of the facts”, and who had even less reason to be party to such a horrendous crime; he was a father himself and had what was described as a “positive childhood”.
Despite this, Palmer became a violent drug dealer who was arrested just weeks before Cassius’ death for assaulting his then-wife.
And while Forth’s parents wrote a letter to the judge taking ownership of their son’s behaviour and acknowledging the impact of his actions, Quinlan said the opposite was true of Palmer’s.
“What am I to make of a reference from them that protests your innocence and fails to mention that you were using a gram of methylamphetamine a week while apparently being a committed family man, and leaves out the fact that you were running a successful drug dealing operation from their own property?”
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