Source : Perth Now news
Two men who beat, punched, kicked and urinated on their disabled housemate for four days before he died were motivated by their belief the victim was a child predator, a court has found.
The two men, now aged 21 and 22, were sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday for the 2023 murder of their 32-year-old housemate, after he allegedly confessed to wanting to sexually assault one of the men’s girlfriends.
After the two men heard the admission, they subjected the victim to a terrifying four-day ordeal in their house at Tregear in Sydney’s west, during which he pleaded for death on multiple occasions, the agreed facts state.
The offenders, aged 18 and 19 at the time of the murder, the victim and the girlfriend cannot be identified for legal reasons.
The attack was a “grave instance of the offence of murder”, Justice Belinda Rigg said.
The 32-year-old was repeatedly punched and kicked by the two offenders after the 18-year-old woke up to find the man standing over him and his 16-year-old girlfriend as they slept, Justice Rigg said.
After being confronted, the older man – who had a disease known as Marfan syndrome causing significant physical disability – admitted to wanting to sexually touch the 16-year-old girl, according to the agreed facts.
The 32-year-old further admitted to having child sexual abuse material on his mobile phone, which was later burned by the two killers.
The confessions prompted an unrelenting wave of violence against him, including being beaten with the wooden handle of a mattock, leaving him with bruises to his entire body.
The two younger men also urinated on the victim, which Justice Rigg said would have caused “humiliation and distress” to him.
“Mate, I’m just trying to help you, I know you’re a pedophile,” the 18-year-old is agreed to have said to the victim.
“Confronting” assaults on the victim were filmed as the offenders and the girlfriend had been trying to get the victim to admit things on video, Justice Rigg said.
The agreed facts in the case of the two younger men state the 16-year-old girl also assaulted the victim over the four-day period, but she was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter by Justice Rigg in July.
Their shared histories of being subjected to sexual abuse as children were a significant factor in the scale of the violence the two men inflicted, Justice Rigg said.
“Molestation, the same shit that happened to me,” the 19-year-old said to the victim of in one of the videos discovered by police.
The older man will be eligible for release in 2032 while the younger man will be eligible a year later.
1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)
National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028
