A near miss

Stuff reports:

A Kiwi teenager radicalised online planned to ram a car into a group of people in Christchurch and then stab them.

The teenager wrote a goodbye note to his mother, then started a violent incident, but has since told a psychologist when it began he “decided not to hurt anybody because he did not have the means to kill enough people“, Crown prosecutor Chris Lange told the Christchurch District Court at sentencing on Thursday. 

“The reason no-one was hurt was that he did not have access to knives,” Lange said. But there was significant premeditation, and hostility towards non-Muslims. 

So the reason this didn’t happen is because he didn’t think he could kill enough people to make his suicide worthwhile.

After his arrest, the youth told police he was angry and had “done it for Allah”. He had left school at age 15, become socially isolated, and converted to Islam. 

He presumably is still under the age of 18.

The court has adopted a rehabilitative approach to the teen’s sentencing, with Judge Stephen O’Driscoll releasing him on intensive supervision with a list of conditions and a warning that if he breaches the conditions or reoffends, he will likely be sent to prison.

If he reoffends, he may kill a dozen people so I hope the supervision is very good.

Lange said even though the youth had been treated for months by the youth forensic psychiatric team, he was still seen as a high risk of reoffending, and a risk to family members and members of the public.

So we’re letting him out on supervision!

He urged intensive supervision be imposed because prison would mean limited access to the rehabilitation and socialising programmes he needed. The strict conditions proposed for the intensive supervision were “almost unheard of”, he said.

That sounds somewhat reassuring.