by Malcolm Knox
Police stations were also on alert for psychotic episodes, particularly after an incident at Wetherill Park, in Sydney’s south-west, in February 2006. Ngoc Qui ‘David’ Khuu, 33, arrived at the police station to complain that he was being followed and his family was being threatened by someone who claimed Khuu owed them money. Khuu arrived at the station at 3 am. Unbeknown to the police, he was a paranoid ice user who had taken to carrying knives to defend himself against his ghosts.
He had to wait three hours until the morning shift came on, and when Constable Elizabeth Roth arrived, Khuu jumped the desk and put her in a headlock. Roth fought free, but her belt and holstered gun had fallen to the floor. She picked them up and ran down a corridor, hoping to get inside a meal room. Khuu chased her, with his knife drawn. She swung her belt at him, but as she got to the meal room he lunged after her, stabbing her in the arm, and wrested her Glock pistol out of her belt. As she backed away, he shot her in the chest and ran off. By the time he was turned in by his brother two days later, Khuu had already sold the gun to pay for more drugs.
It was not an isolated incident, either within Sydney or outside. Newcastle police crime manager Gerard Lawson said two months after Khuu’s attack that the safety of police officers was under threat across the region. ‘One of the problems is that [ice users] are far more aggressive,’ he said. ‘And it’s a vastly different aggression. Their ability to see logic is very slim and it’s very hard to reason with them.’ On the night of 22 May 2004, a 27-year-old Melbourne ice user and dealer, Gregory Rama Biggs, was shot by police in Carlton after he lunged at them with two samurai swords in what was described as a ‘ninja’-style attack.
The secretary of the NSW police union, Bob Pritchard, said ice was creating a ‘perfect storm’ of violence that was threatening police and sucking resources away from their core functions. He asked officers to log all ice-related incidents and requested the state government to train specialised ‘ice’ teams.
On another frontline, ambulance officers and paramedics were dealing with the same issue: not just an upsurge in violence but an upsurge in incidents for which their training and equipment was not sufficient. Seven paramedics were forced to take time off work after being seriously assaulted in 2005–06. It wasn’t that paramedics were facing crazed ice users every day; it was that when they did, they had no protocols for controlling them.
Buck Reed, the chief executive of the first-aid officers’ organisation UniMed, says the problem worsened dramatically around 2003–04.
‘Meth first showed up in the dance party scene in the late 1990s. Not that many people took a lot of crystal meth at dance parties. But since 2000 we’ve been running into a lot more aggressive people. It’s the meth–alcohol combination. Ten beers and three lines in, the person becomes aggressive and unpleasant to everyone. Meth is the ingredient that’s associated with the aggression.’
While drunks still accounted for a majority of violent incidents, Reed says, dealing with drunks at least falls within the first-aiders’ knowledge and procedures.
‘With a drunken violent person, you can tell them to behave and eventually they’ll listen,’ Reed says. ‘It may take one or two people to bring them under control, whereas a person on methamphetamines has no sense of boundaries. A drunk will stop struggling when he realises there’s no use. Methamphetamine users don’t recognise the concept that they can be overwhelmed.
‘Capsicum spray doesn’t work on amphetamine users. They become half-blinded and angry, as opposed to just angry. A person going through a meth psychosis doesn’t care much for your safety either.
‘Meth frightens paramedics, it frightens police, it frightens the community. Cannabis, on the other hand, has bad effects but it never frightened anyone.’
Many paramedics started getting injured from 2002, he says. ‘Things like bruises from being thrown down staircases. It’s not that they’re angry at you as a first-aid officer. More that they think you’re a 15-foot-tall werewolf with blood dripping from your teeth. They attack you because they’re terrified.’
Allan Eade, an ambulance officer in Victoria, has collected a first-hand sample of these acts of violent paranoia at the cost of his personal safety.
Eade was working at a dance party in 2003 when he was called to the first-aid tent by St John Ambulance paramedics. There he found a 22-year-old man, who had been awake for five days, ‘destroying the first-aid facility. Police arrived, but he was going crazy. It took eight police, three cans of capsicum spray, a Taser and half an hour before they finally subdued him. The spray did nothing. He might as well have been chewing on peppermint mouthwash. That was my first “Incredible Hulk” experience.’
Previously, Eade says, there was a problem of misdiagnosis: ‘If we came across meth users, we might have just thought they were extremely angry drunks.’
But that changed when he was himself assaulted.
‘There was a guy who was punching the front of a bus, on Nicholson Street. We were called in—the description was: a bald man with no shirt was spotted screaming at traffic.’
Eade’s ambulance arrived, and the officers were trying to make a decision on how to control the bald man, when a passerby yelled abuse at him.
‘Suddenly he turned on me because I was the nearest person,’ Eade says. ‘It wasn’t at all directed personally at me. It felt different from a drunk. Drunks can get very personal. This guy just lashed out. The look in his eye was quite empty. I ended up with bruises and scrapes, and broke my glasses.
‘It’s scary when it happens. With drunks, it’s mostly interpersonal violence and it’s between two people. But with meth users, the patient, the police and the paramedics can all get hurt.’
Of 8000 ambulance calls each week in Victoria, the number of ice-related incidents has remained low. But, says Eade, they suck up a disproportionate amount of time and staff.
‘It’s the cases like these that require so many resources. Security staff and police are called in to sedate them, because they’re so powerful there’s always an element of risk.’
For every Damien Peters or Matthew Gagalowicz, whose ice use escalated run-of-the-mill violence into savage killings and crazily purposeful cover-ups, there were dozens of other acts of ice-triggered violence that didn’t go so far. For every out-of-control sexual attack like those of Mohammed Kerbatieh and Dudley Aslett, there were innumerable assaults by men on women, both reported and unreported. The world’s natural store of violence didn’t begin with crystal meth, and nor was it created by the drug. Violence was, is, and will remain a fact. But methamphetamine gave the monster a green light—to arise, and to build upon itself. By letting loose violent and libidinous impulses, and simultaneously disabling the brain’s control switches, ice acted as an accelerant to kinds of violence that already existed.
Sunia James Kafovalu was a born brawler who didn’t need methamphetamine to rev him up. Abandoned by his mother at the age of four, raised by a veritable rolodex of foster parents, expelled from school at fifteen, a weekly ecstasy user and daily drinker from his mid-teens, Kafovalu was simply a young man who never got over a bad start. He had a criminal record from the age of sixteen for a range of offences, including assault and armed robbery. He never held down a job and spent most of his time in south-western Sydney hanging around with his mates and, on weekend nights, venturing into the city to seek out trouble.
It was almost inevitable, in the early 2000s, that such a human tinderbox would catch the spark of crystal methamphetamine. Kafovalu became a regular smoker of the drug in 2003. On 26 February of that year, at 3.45 am, Kafovalu and a friend set upon a defenceless young waiter, Andrew O’Kane, as O’Kane got out of a taxi on King Street, Newtown. They robbed him of the $50 he had in his wallet, forced him to withdraw another $400 from an ATM, kicked and punched him and ran away.
A year later, at 3.10 am on 18 February 2004, Kafovalu and some of his friends, flying on ice, beat up an unknown man on the corner of George and Goulburn streets in the
Sydney CBD. A security guard broke up the fight and the group went to a convenience store to eat some food. Still worked up by the first fight, they came out of the convenience store and set upon a group of male and female Irish tourists. Kafovalu stomped on one of the tourists, Phillip Fleming, and chased down and punched another, Ian Doyle. Two female police officers arrived and Kafovalu tried to run away from them. Unable to outpace either of the women, he turned and lashed out at them, pushing one to the ground. He could menace a thin, lone man and a group of harmless backpackers, but Kafovalu was no match for Constables Dumas and Gao. The policewomen cuffed and arrested him, and he was later sentenced to six years in jail.
Just a normal night in Sydney at the height of the ice age.
By the beginning of 2004, the courts and jails were filling up with ice criminals. Of course, there were the traffickers and manufacturers, but most of these would have been in the heroin trade a few years earlier and weren’t created out of anywhere but greed. Meanwhile there was a new breed of ice-fuelled thrillseekers who led police on high-speed car chases. South Australian police commissioner Mal Hyde reacted to a report showing a high percentage of police arrestees for driving misdemeanours testing positive for methamphetamine: ‘Quite a lot of them reported they had failed to stop when driving a car and directed to stop by police,’ Mr Hyde said. ‘And quite a number of them admitted having been involved in pursuits with police . . . the most common drug used before a police pursuit was methyamphetamine.’
There were also, however, the bashers and robbers, the thieves and rapists, who weren’t, like junkies, out on the rampage to obtain money to feed the habit; rather, it was their habit, and the effects of the drug itself, that got them into trouble.
The years 2002 and 2003 represent an inferno of ice-related crime. By May 2004, West Australian police superintendent Fred Gere was calling methamphetamine ‘the biggest threat to the nation after terrorism’. Yet terrorism in Australia has never approached ice in terms of personal trauma and body count.
There was John Andrew Seckold, a lifetime drug user and cast-off from a terrible abused childhood, who, on ice, ‘lost two weeks of [his] life’ in October and November 2003. Seckold lost more than that. He was sentenced to six years in jail for a spree of robbery and theft in Canberra covering twelve offences in twelve days, including stealing money from an 86-year-old man selling poppies for Legacy.
There was AB, a Filipino drug dealer who started taking ice in 2002. Working for his superior dealer, Yong Kee Tan, AB helped to organise a hit on an accountant named Dominic Li in December 2002. High on ice, AB and some other men attacked Li in front of his wife, in his suburban house, pouring acid down his throat. Li died three weeks later and AB is serving at least thirteen years behind bars.
There was Azzam Abdul Hamid, a Lebanese-Australian from the Wollongong area who tried to make a living by buying and selling mixed businesses. Hamid, a psychiatrist said, became ‘floridly psychotic’ under the influence of crystal meth. That didn’t stop him continuing to smoke it. Hamid went to jail for repeated assaults on his female partners. One after another, his de factos lined up to tell stories of how he’d punched them, kicked them and locked them up. On ice, Hamid couldn’t control his temper. He became acutely paranoid, accusing one of his victims of lacing his coffee and cigarettes with crystal meth. (Like Everett Ellinwood’s American truck driver who’d killed his boss 33 years previously, Hamid was so focused on methamphetamine that he believed others were trying to force it upon him, and he took it out on them in an ironic, and misguided, response.) Guilty on nine counts, Hamid was put behind bars for at least six years.
There was David Lawrence Morrison, who at four years of age had found his mother dead at home. Later in his childhood, he was regularly beaten by his father. Morrison used drugs from an early age and by sixteen was a break and enter merchant. Between 1997 and 2003 he stole more than $470 000 worth of goods from shops, individuals and houses. In the latter part of this period, as his burgling intensified, he was wearing the ice forcefield. He was sent to jail for a minimum of three years.
There was Adrian John Van Boxtel, a Melbourne man who became hooked on ice while undergoing an acrimonious split with his de facto partner, Simone Snowden. Van Boxtel was in some ways a typical embittered ex-husband: he was at war with Simone and her family over access to his infant children. But he was an embittered ex-husband on ice, which is an entirely different creature. On 27 April 2002, Van Boxtel took ice, which a court later agreed had a significant effect on his behaviour. He went to a friend’s house and stole a sawn-off shotgun along with some other possessions. At Snowden’s house, he shot her car. He then threatened an acquaintance for ‘causing trouble with’ Simone, even though this man had never met her. Under the influence of ice, Van Boxtel went on a rampage of offending, including threatening to kill, false imprisonment, aggravated burglary and intentionally causing injury. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.
There was Justin John De Gruchy, a 34-year-old drug dealer who had delusions of grandeur about being the ‘saviour’ of St Kilda prostitutes. De Gruchy would drive from his rented unit in Tullamarine to St Kilda, take heroin-addicted prostitutes home and promise to wean them off the opiate. His cure? Give them ice. In June 2003, De Gruchy had two of his protegees with him. One was a 38-year-old named Christine Hammond, and the other was a fifteen-year-old girl. They picked up another prostitute, took her to Tullamarine, and tortured and humiliated her for several days, smoking ice throughout. They put a chain around her neck, sexually assaulted her with a rolling pin, and forced her to eat dog food and perform oral sex on a man who had come in to buy drugs. The fifteen-year-old girl kicked and punched the victim. De Gruchy, the ringmaster, was sentenced to a minimum of seven years after he pleaded guilty to six charges.
It was only thanks to blind luck that these offenders didn’t kill someone. The common characteristic of their crimes was the perpetrator’s complete lack of control over the consequences. Once crystal meth had taken hold, there was no such thing as calculating the effect of an assault. Ice erases the ability to calculate. In 2003, all across Australia there were lives being damaged forever, thanks to someone crossing a line while on ice. And there were also lives being ended. Matthew Gagalowicz lost his temper with his drug dealer, and killed him. Dudley Aslett lost control of his gun and shot dead a pharmacist he only wanted to rob. Damien Peters murdered and dismembered two of his lovers. In December 2003 two western Sydney ice users, John Hohaia and Mostafa Abdulkader, murdered their friend Alexander Szirt. Hohaia and Abdulkader had been on a binge for several hours when they called up Szirt, late at night, apparently to ask him to pick up some beer and snacks for them. Somewhere along the line, they decided that Szirt was ‘not like’ them. In the kitchen of Hohaia’s mother’s house, Hohaia made some remarks about Szirt, to which Szirt replied with the two-finger salute. Hohaia proceeded to choke him, growling, ‘Don’t ever disrespect me in my house.’
He didn’t kill Szirt then. That came a few hours later. Hohaia and Abdulkader worked themselves up into a lather of hatred for Szirt, and between 1.30 and 3 am on 3 December, they bashed him ferociously, punching and kicking him even as he lay unconscious on the ground outside the house. He was dead by sunrise. Why? As Justice David Kirby said in the NSW Supreme Court, where he sentenced the killers to two decades behind bars, ‘[Hohaia] said that Mr Szirt was not like them. He was right. Mr Szirt was not “like them”. He had a job. He had prospects. He was paying off his car. He came from a loving family. It appears, at least on the part of Mr Hohaia, that there was envy in respect of the advantages Alexander Szirt enjoyed.’
These were all deaths that arose from violent acts with specific contexts: arguments and robberies. The killers all had motivations that obeyed some kind of logic, however twisted. Ice was merely the accelerant that took simple conflicts to a higher level.
Trent Jennings was a different case, and an infinitely sad one for all concerned. Jennings’s crim
e showed a new side of crystal meth: when paranoia intensified into a cataclysmic kind of fear, and the terrified user, an otherwise peaceful individual, lashes out with terrible unintended consequences.
The night before New Year’s Eve 2003, Trent Jennings made a plan. At eighteen years of age, Jennings was a young gay man whose entry into the world was brimming with possibility. He’d only recently moved east from Perth, just that September. He was living in an apartment in Narwee, in the south-western suburbs of Sydney, but worked as a waiter in an inner-city hotel. He was taking his first steps on the trail from suburbia to a lifestyle that was cosmopolitan, rich with adventure, and salted with risk. Jennings, like many an eighteen-year-old, was an experimenter, a risk-taker.
On 30 December 2003, he was seeking out the thrill of the unknown. He’d done this before. He had his own little patterns and routines. He sat on the internet for a few hours, cruising for new friends. In a chat room he found Giuseppe Vitale, a 32-year-old man with whom he struck up an immediate rapport. They edged towards arranging a meeting. They agreed that they each liked being tied up while having fellatio performed on them. They agreed that they liked the buzz of doing it outside, in public places. They exchanged a series of messages negotiating an agreement on what they’d do.
Throughout the night, Jennings took ecstasy and ice. This was a part of his build-up to sexual encounters. He’d been a party ecstasy taker for a few years by then, and while his introduction to ice had been more recent, he’d taken to it like a duck to water. He enjoyed its libido-enhancing effects.
At 9.15 pm, Vitale emailed Jennings a photo of himself. They then swapped phone numbers, and at 9.35 pm spoke briefly by phone. Vitale agreed to come and meet Jennings outside his unit. Once the meeting had been established, Jennings took three or four ecstasy tablets and injected an eightball of crystal meth. It was a disastrously toxic dose. Possibly he had forgotten how much he had already taken. Whatever the cause, the high dose did far more than heighten Jennings’s sexual arousal.