Psychosis impaired teen’s understanding of act in Bandar Utama school murder, court says
by Malay Mail · Borneo Post OnlinePETALING JAYA (Sept 23): The Shah Alam High Court rejected claims that the 16-year-old schoolgirl’s murder in Bandar Utama last year was planned for months, finding that the accused’s psychotic illness impaired his understanding of the act and that the alleged “plan” stemmed from his delusions.
In her full written grounds, Judge Adlin Abdul Majid said she could not accept that merely knowing he was pushing a knife into the deceased’s abdomen and that it would cause her to bleed was sufficient to establish that the accused understood the nature of the act.
She added that an accused who has knowledge of the mechanics but not of the reality of what he is doing cannot be said to know the nature of the act.
“The nature of an act of homicide is not exhausted by its physical character. It must include the fact that the object of the act is a living human being with an existence independent of the actor, and that what is being destroyed is a real life, in the real world, permanently,” she said.
Adlin noted that a psychiatric report prepared by Dr Ian Lloyd Anthony, director and senior consultant forensic psychiatrist at Hospital Bahagia Ulu Kinta, recorded that the accused, through immersion in video games, came to view all persons as “NPCs” — useless, monotonous and computer-controlled characters lacking independent thought.
“He applied that label to students and teachers at the school, to his own parents and to society as a whole.
She also said the report recorded that due to the multitude of intense psychotic symptoms, the accused was transported into a world of fiction and fantasy, detached from reality, in a parallel world inhabited only by himself and the deceased.
“DW2 (Dr Ian) described delusional atmosphere and delusional memory as primary delusions, which are rare and are indicative of extremely severe psychosis.
“A primary delusion is not a mistaken inference drawn from experience. It is a direct, unmediated alteration in the way reality itself presents.
“It cannot be reasoned with, because it is not the product of reasoning,” she said.
Nevertheless, Adlin said the most telling piece of evidence supporting this finding is that the accused did not grasp the finality of death and believed that the deceased would be reincarnated.
“From this evidence, I am satisfied that the child’s psychotic illness had, at the material time, deprived him of the capacity to comprehend that he was taking the life of a living person, as opposed to enacting a fantasy upon an object of his own delusional construction.
“Accordingly, I am satisfied on a balance of probabilities that at the time of the Incident, by reason of unsoundness of mind, the child did not have the capacity to know the nature of the act he committed,” she said.
Prosecution challenge
On the prosecution’s argument that the accused’s delusions were simply a reason or motive for the killing, Adlin disagreed, finding that the delusions did not just give him a reason to kill but affected his ability to understand that what he was doing was wrong.
“Rather, it is the delusions themselves, and the associated dissociative state, that deprived him of that appreciation,” she said.
She also rejected the prosecution’s contention that the accused’s months-long planning showed he had the ability to organise, sequence and adjust his actions.
“The evidence establishes that every material element of the ‘plan’ relied upon by the prosecution was itself generated within and by the delusional system, rather than by rational, self-interested deliberation directed at a real-world objective.
“The target was selected not by reason of any relationship, dispute, or rational motive, but by an erotomanic delusion attaching to a girl whom, as the evidence established, the child had never once spoken to or otherwise contacted,” she said.
Adlin noted that the original date of the planned killing was also fixed to coincide with the anniversary of an atrocity committed 25 years earlier in another country by two young men whom the accused had come to identify with through his illness.
In addition, writings on the knives were made at the instruction of a hallucinated voice he attributed to Dylan Klebold, while the clothing was assembled piece by piece to replicate that worn by the Columbine High School shooting perpetrators.
None of this, the judge said, reflected the conduct of a rational, self-interested actor but rather the enactment of a delusional identification that had consumed the child’s inner life.
She also said the accused’s failure to plan an escape, dispose of evidence, or evade capture after the incident was more consistent with, and positively explained by, the psychiatric evidence that his actions were driven by psychosis.
“A plan which was meticulously prepared as to matters of costume and inscription, yet totally indifferent to detection, risk and escape, is not, in my assessment, the plan of a rational, guilt-aware mind,” she said.
She also dismissed the prosecution’s argument that the accused’s stalking of the deceased showed focused, deliberate and non-random targeting inconsistent with a psychotic attack.
“Based on DW2’s unrebutted evidence, sustained and specific attention to a single object of fixation, over a period exceeding a year and in the complete absence of any real encounter or exchange between the child and the deceased, is a recognised feature of erotomanic delusion,” she said.
Adlin also accepted Dr Ian’s evidence that a person can experience severe psychosis while still being able to carry out simple, everyday tasks, rejecting the prosecution’s argument that the accused’s normal behaviour on the day showed he was aware of what was happening around him and therefore could not be considered legally insane.
She also rejected the prosecution’s argument that the severity and repeated nature of the attack showed the accused deliberately intended to kill the victim and ensure she had no chance of being rescued.
“From DW2’s evidence, the violence inflicted on the deceased went well beyond what was needed to cause death, and served no purpose.
“This fact together with the disparity between the number of injuries and the child’s recollection of them supports the finding that the child’s mind was overwhelmed by psychosis and dissociation at the time of the incident.
She said the same detached state continued after the incident, with the accused seen calmly walking through the chaos of alarms and screams, stopping to retrieve and drink from his water bottle while still holding the knife.
“This event corroborates, rather than undermines, the account of dissociation during the act itself,” she said.
Untimely and tragic death
Adlin also said that her decision to acquit and discharge the accused did not make the deceased’s death any less devastating or real because it was caused by illness rather than malice.
She stressed that despite finding the accused committed the act but was not criminally responsible due to unsoundness of mind, the decision should not diminish the value of the deceased’s life or cause anyone to forget her.
“This is not a finding that the act did not happen, or that no one was responsible for it.
“It is a finding that the person who committed the act was at the time in the grip of a serious psychotic illness that had gone unrecognised and untreated for years, and that the law does not hold such a person criminally responsible for conduct he could not, at that moment, appreciate as wrong,” she said.
Noting that the deceased was a young student with close family and friends and a bright future ahead of her, Adlin said her untimely death was an immense and irreversible loss, stressing that her family’s grief was not diminished by the accused’s diagnosis and that the judgment did not ask them to see it that way.
Instead, Adlin said the case highlighted how far serious mental illness can progress in a child without being noticed by those around him, and how serious the consequences can be.
“Here, symptoms of a very early-onset and ultimately extremely severe psychotic illness were present from the age of nine, documented over five years in family accounts, school records and teachers’ observations, yet never once recognised as an illness.
“The signs were there: withdrawal, delusional thinking, a refusal to remove his mask, chronic lateness born of fear and hallucinated voices.
“They were read, understandably, as behavioural or disciplinary problems rather than as a medical emergency. The cost of that misreading has now been borne by two families,” she said.
She said if any good could come from the tragedy, it was for parents, schools, the courts and the wider public to better understand the signs and consequences of untreated mental illness in children.
“…So that symptoms are recognised and treated earlier, and never again permitted to progress unaddressed, to a point of such devastating consequence so that other families may be spared what both these families have suffered.
“It is in this spirit that this decision was made,” she said.