On Saturday, February 3rd, my wife and I briefly considered taking our daughters to the local sushi train for dinner. I can’t remember why we didn’t opt for it.
Had we gone, we would have witnessed the murder of Vyleen White, who was stabbed to death in front of her six-year-old granddaughter at around six pm. Four teenagers stole her small car. A teenager stabbed her multiple times. The group escaped in the car. A doctor nearby saw the whole thing and approached Vyleen. But by then, he said, it was too late. She was covered in blood. The child watched on.
The car was dumped a couple of suburbs away. Twenty-four hours later, a teen handed themselves into the police. In the ensuing 24 hours, another four were arrested—one with murder.
My local Facebook groups were on fire. Dozens of vigilante citizens cried for justice, working together to film police movements through various suburbs so they could find out the homes of the offenders. One neighbour posted a photo from his backyard: policemen with a rifle waiting by his back fence paused to launch an ambush on the house nearby. The officer’s face is blank in the photo, but his eyes gaze directly into the camera. He is aware he’s being watched.
While the police are silent, there is a flurry of media activity to find the identity of the four boys. CCTV footage: they are revealed as African. Then Sudanese. News reporters can’t tell their identity - their juveniles - but Channel Nine makes it to the doorstep of the alleged murderer’s mother and blurs out her face. She apologises, but the rhetoric against her in the Facebook comments is poison.
The commercial news networks leave cookie crumbs of details that serve as a dog whistle to the bored bogans on Facebook. The mum fled Sudan, and her son arrived here as a baby. Her son was out on bail at the time of the murder for other armed robberies.
My Facebook group says youth crime is insane in suburban Australia, particularly in the Redbank/Springfield area. Kids today… etc. The data doesn’t back up this assertion. Queensland still lags behind NSW for crime rates, and the rate of youth crime has continued to drop over the last decade. There is no youth crime wave.
The husband of the deceased appeared on A Current Affair and said politicians are gutless about responding to youth crime. It’s an election year, and Premier Steve Miles publicly muses opening the media to the children’s court. The opposition leader loudly proclaims Labor closed the children’s court in the first place.
It’s one thing to read comments online. Another to hear them out loud. I’m at a child’s birthday party where one of the hosts is a prison guard. Communal chatter turns to teenagers who need to be punished - many agree with some physical threat.
‘It’s the only language they understand.’
That’s an actual quote.
The guard complains that the justice system relies too heavily on prisons to sort out offenders. The prisons are overcrowded. A quick Google shows me he’s entirely correct. New prisons are being built to deal with a growing prison population.
A week later, we take our children to the shopping centre for dinner. It’s quiet. I might be imagining it, but I feel like strangers are smiling at each other more. There’s a mobile police beat at the site of the murder and extra security guards in all of the shops. I wonder how long it’ll last.
I think about it all week. It’s awful and complicated. And my Facebook feed is alight with fear. People are scared and pissed off. And when people are afraid - when they imagine their children looking on as an elder bleeds and dies - they will say and do the most extraordinary things. Fear moves people to extremes. To positions of violence.
‘We should take justice into our own hands.’
An actual quote.
Online, my neighbours are considering civil war, perhaps like the civil wars that upend a country like Sudan, displacing millions. Sudan is also affected by desertification - a climate change effect triggered in drylands that leads to food insecurity and poverty.
Less than a week after her mother’s murder, Cindy Micallef hosts a press conference where the Queensland African Communities Council joins her. They call for calm.
‘Mum’s legacy will live on in peace,’ she said. ‘She was never one to be prejudiced, she always looked for the best in people.’
Members of the African community have faced verbal abuse. Kids are scared to go to school. Attacks on social media are rife.
The vast defenders of the neighbourhood insist it’s a nice place to live. And then publically contemplate beating black children in the street.
Something like this happened when we lived in Northcote- a schizophrenic teenager stabbed a man in front of our local supermarket- similar reaction- 'we shouldn't have supported accommodation here, lock them all up' was the catch cry for ours.
It's terrifying to me that people hate so easily
That they condemn so easily.
That any point of difference will be blamed.
Then I remember the witch trials.
Then I realise it feels like we, as a species, are going backwards.
Surely a person should just be a person to us by now?
All that aside- I am sorry that you were so closely exposed to the most scared and therefore worst side of humanity.
And thank you for writing about it.