Teenagers locked up over cruel, sickening attacks on gay men they lured to Perth parks from Grindr

Five teenagers have been locked up over a string of sickening attacks on five different gay men, who they lured to a dark Perth park after meeting on a popular dating app to assault and rob them. The brutal assaults last September emerged from a premeditated catfishing scheme in which the group of boys aged 15 to 17 posed as young men on Grindr to meet homosexual men seeking intimate encounters. Perth Children’s Court was told a number of the teens, who cannot be identified because they were juveniles at the time of the attacks, were armed with a machete, a kitchen knife, a metal pole, a crowbar, a taser and a can of pepper spray. They were each wearing “ski masks” and used the cover of darkness to take their unsuspecting victims by surprise at their respective agreed-upon rendezvous points — three different parks in South Lake and Hamilton Hill — on the night of September 17. One of the victims, aged 30, had just pulled up to South Lake oval in his car when he noticed a torch light at the opposite side of the park. A short time later the group of boys appeared from behind the treeline wearing dark clothing and with their faces covered. “You are here to meet someone,” one of the teens said to the man, who was then surrounded and immediately set upon. What followed was a horrifying and degrading assault that one of the boys recorded with his phone. The man was hit in the back of the head with a metal pole, pepper sprayed, tasered in the back and punched in the face. When the man managed to escape, he ran across the oval “screaming for help”. When the group caught up to him they tripped him, jumped on the back of his head and kicked him in the ribs and face, knocking out two teeth in the process. The man was “screaming stop” and thought he was going to die when he was lifted to his feet and told to say he was a paedophile. When he refused, one of the boys threatened him, stating: “Keep yelling for help c..., I swear to God I will drown you in this f...ing bush”. He then held a knife to his throat and told him to “shut your f...ing mouth or I’ll stab you”. The man was then dragged more than 100m to some basketball courts where they taunted and teased him, detaining him against a fence and stealing his phone. After he managed to flee again the group stomped on his head, tasered him in his genitals and forced him to take his clothes off and “go for a run”, prompting them to chase him as he sprinted naked across the oval. The man took refuge in a nearby swamp, where he remained hidden in the reeds until the group left. When he finally emerged from the water, he passed out. “When he came to he saw a pool of blood where he had been,” State prosecutor Sinead Purvis told the court on Wednesday. A short time later about 8pm the group targeted another man, who arrived at Anning Park on his bicycle expecting to meet a man in his 20s who he thought he’d been messaging on Grindr. After he arrived the group in dark clothing emerged “out of the darkness”, surrounded him and struck him from behind. The man ran into the road to get away and was hit by a slow-moving car as a result. The group then grabbed him and took him back to the parkland, where they hit him with a pole. The man has no memory of the next half hour, during which he was brutalised and bashed by the boys. Sickening mobile phone footage taken by one of the teens shows the man “attempting to speak”, his words slurring and incoherent. While he lay on the ground on his back, he was struck in the head and face, had a taser held to his genitals, and robbed. Just before 1am the next morning, a man who thought he was meeting an 18-year-old man he’d met on Grindr parked his car at Stillwater Gardens in South Lake and got out to see a teen standing in the dark. The group - armed with a crowbar, a machete and pepper spray - sprinted towards him and dragged him from the road, taking his car keys and punching and kicking him all over his body, leaving him missing skin and with welts on his back. When he didn’t the group armed with a crowbar, a machete and pepper spray sprinted towards him and then dragged him from the road, taking his car keys and punching and kicking him all over his body including to his neck. After he finally managed to escape and call police, a chunk of the victim’s skin was missing from his right elbow and he had welts on his back. A fourth victim, who came face to face with the group in Hamilton Hill on the morning of the 18th, has little memory of the prolonged bashing he sustained. The court was told he was chased by the teens for some time, and beat-up on the ground while yelling for help. After he lost consciousness the group used large boulders to smash the windscreen of his car and stole his phone and car keys. His next memory is bleeding heavily from the head and having blood all over his clothes. He was concussed, his face, eye and cheekbones heavily bruised and swollen, he had cuts to the back of his head, and his arms and legs were badly grazed. A fifth victim, aged 33, managed to escape a similar fate to the other men after he realised something was wrong upon his arrival. The court was told he had agreed to “meet for a consensual sexual encounter” with a person he thought was an adult male. When he saw the group, the man ran back to his car and locked the doors, prompting the teens to throw rocks at it as he drove away. In a victim impact statement, one of the victims described being reduced to a “shell of himself” since the attack, finding himself fearful to go outside and becoming increasingly isolated. The court was told one of the victims had been under the impression he was messaging a 24-year-old man on Grindr, but that when the account holder claimed he was actually 15 years old, the man continued communicating with him. The remaining four had all believed the person they were messaging online had been of a legal age. While Judge Wendy Hughes said she was prepared to accept that the motive for the offending appeared to be vigilantism — “as opposed to an entrenched hatred to the gay community”, it did not make a difference to sentencing as neither motive was mitigating or changed the teens’ moral culpability. “This was not a hate crime, this was an act of vigilantism,” she said. Judge Hughes told the court each of the victims was outnumbered and unarmed and had been victimised, degraded and humiliated. “Any form of vigilantism cannot be tolerated in our community,” she said, before acknowledging that apart from one instance, the teens had purported to be over 18 years in relation to all other victims. She added the seed had been planted with that “first act of vigilantism”, referencing a text message one of the boys had sent to another on the night of the attacks, which stated: “come catch paedos”. She said the “cruel” offending demonstrated a “misconception by these young offenders that gay men are inherently deviant and have a sexual interest in children”. “At the end of the day these victims were targeted by virtue of being homosexual men. What you did was wrong and it can never ever be justified,” Judge Hughes told the teens. Each of the teenagers was sentenced to juvenile detention, with the terms consisting of two years and two months; 22 months; 19 months; 18 months; and 18 months.

Teenagers locked up over cruel, sickening attacks on gay men they lured to Perth parks from Grindr

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