Four African gang members have been jailed for murdering Melbourne teenager Declan Cutler in 2022 in an unprovoked attack that shocked Australia.
The killers, who cannot be named as they were minors at the time of the savage crime, will all spend nearly two decades in jail for their roles in the murder of Declan, 16, who was walking home from a party in Reservoir on March 12, 2022 when he was chased down, stabbed and stomped to death on a nature strip.
Declan suffered 56 sharp-force injuries, 30 puncture wounds and 66 blunt-force injuries in the brutal two-minute attack carried out by a gang of eight African thugs in from a gang called the 9ers, based in Tarneit, who were out in a stolen car looking for the rival H-Town gang.
Declan was not associated with either gang, and did not know his killers.
Of the four sentenced on Wednesday, one is an Egyptian-born Sudanese refugee, one was born in New Zealand to a Samoan mother and a South Sudanese father, one was born in New South Wales to South Sudanese parents, and one was born in Australia to Somalian parents but lived in Kenya as a child.
All four were found guilty of murder in February after a month-long judge-only trial in the Supreme Court of Victoria in December.
In sentencing on Wednesday Judge Rita Incerti said “words fail to describe the shocking brutality on a defenceless teenager”, and called the killing one of “incalculable inhumanity”.
One of the murderers, now 20, was sentenced to 18 years’ jail with a non-parole period of 12 years. A second offender, now 19, was jailed for 19.5 years with a 14.5-year non-parole period. A third, also now 19, was jailed for 17.5 years with a 12-year non-parole period, and a fourth, now 17, was jailed for 19 years with a non-parole period of 14 years.
Judge Incerti described how the gang pulled up alongside Declan, who had become separated from his friends after they left a house party at about 2.30am, in a stolen Mazda and attacked him, passing each other knives to stab him repeatedly while others kicked and stomped on him, before driving off.
They then returned to stomp on him again and steal his shoes, and one of the callous killers stayed hear his body and “posed as if to take a photo”.
The entire ferocious attack was caught on CCTV, which Judge Incerti described as “profoundly confronting”.
“The footage will forever haunt anyone who has seen it – particularly Declan’s parents,” she said.
Last year the same judge found a Sudanese teenager, who was 13 at the time of the killing, not guilty by the common law rule of doli incapax that says he was too young to be held criminally responsible.
Another of Declan’s killers, now 16, was last week jailed for 15 years after pleading guilty to murder, and two others, both now 18, were sentenced to 3.5 and 4 years in juvenile detention respectively after pleading guilty to manslaughter and intentionally causing serious injury.
