A light breeze blew through the final moments of an overcast afternoon as Vaifoa Galuega watched her son's best friend collapse.
Warning: this story contains graphic content that some readers may find upsetting.
Solomone Taufeulungaki, a six-foot-tall rugby player described by his teachers as a "protective teddy bear", landed in the arms of his best friend Keidis, blood seeping into his school shirt from multiple stab wounds, outside Brimbank Shopping Centre on Tuesday, June 16.
Vaifoa ran to her son's side and helped him lower Solomone to the ground.
Clothes began flying off bodies and onto the wound.
People returning to their cars with groceries, parents with children they had just picked up from school and teenagers leaving the library began to crowd around the horrifying scene.
One said they should apply pressure to the wound. Others were on their phones calling the police.
Vaifoa rolled the 15-year-old onto his side and watched liquid pour from his body.
She looked into his eyes and he looked back.
"It’s going to be okay," she said, as police officers pushed through the crowd and knelt next to the boy.
"Cut his clothes open," the officers told her, handing her scissors. But the scissors were blunt.
Someone took over the cutting as she clasped Solomone's hands, sharing words of comfort she can't remember as she tried to keep him awake.
Someone else started CPR. Another said his breathing was shallow.
Solomone stared up at a slate sky shielding the sun before his eyes rolled back.
By the time paramedics arrived on the scene, the teenager was gone.
The fatal stabbing of Solomone Taufeulungaki was not the last traumatic death to strike young Melburnians that month.
Less than two weeks later, two more young men, 21-year-old Machar Kot and 20-year-old Thomas Tran, would die in similar attacks.
The increase in violent offending by young people in Melbourne over the last five years has not only been a tragedy for the lives taken, it's been a crippling shock to communities desperate to hold onto their children.
Four months later, police charged nine boys, aged 13 to 17, and two men, aged 20 and 23, with Solomone's murder.
The parents of the boys charged with murder have cut ties with their church for their safety and to avoid prying eyes.
"Everyone knows everyone in this community and there's a lot of shame around what their children [allegedly] did," said Marcellus (Lusa) Washburn, manager at Pasifika organisation Charis Mentoring.
Lusa held one-on-one meetings with the boys accused of Solomone's murder when they were released on bail in October.
The children, he said, felt that shame too, blaming themselves for the pain they caused their parents.
"Some were remorseful. Some were really hard to get through to — they put barriers up and had difficulty saying how they felt out loud," Lusa said.
"They are trying to navigate the justice system and don't fully understand the consequences of what they did — they could be on intensive bail for two years and if they step out of line they could be held on remand."
While reports of a fatal stabbing at the hands of teenagers shocked the community, police officers say they are not surprised.
They are just hoping it won't escalate to guns.
"When you've been in policing long enough, there are very few things that surprise you," said Victoria Police Superintendent Paul Hollowood, who has been stationed in Melbourne's south-east for almost five years.
One thing that did surprise him though, was the fast, fundamental change in how crime began playing out five years ago.
Before 2015, teenagers committing crimes typically started off with low-harm offending like theft and were schooled by others into high-harm offending by the time they were in their 20s.
"That was our traditional way of dealing with youth crime for decades," Superintendent Hollowood said.
But about five years ago, police saw a trend emerge. Children were committing home invasions, car-jackings, armed robberies and aggravated burglaries.
They were as young as 13 and occasionally even younger.
Figures from the Crime Statistics Agency show the annual number of young people in Victoria aged 10–17 committing a crime for the first time dropped by more than 1,000 between 2012 and 2015.
The issue was, and remains, the children who do commit crimes aren't holding back.
The number of aggravated robberies committed by young, first-time offenders jumped more than 61 per cent between 2014 and 2015 and has continued to increase each year since, including a 73 per cent increase last year.
Aggravated burglaries increased by 124 per cent in 2016.
Common assault has risen by almost 78 per cent since 2012.
Superintendent Hollowood said it was unofficially termed a "youth network offender phenomenon, different and unique to Victoria".
"It was a small cohort — I need to say this — youth as a whole get a bad wrap."
That was news to almost no-one — especially young people in Melbourne from diverse communities who were forced to navigate their way through a city that profiled them as thieves and miscreants when they went shopping or walked to school.
Kwar Ater was one of them.
The now 21-year-old was born in South Sudan and moved to Melbourne's west as a young boy.
As a teenager, strangers yelled "Hey Apex!" at him from across the street, referring to the name of one of Melbourne's alleged street gangs.
"Whenever something happened, I was asked if I was there."
The debate over African gangs in the media quickly became politicised, with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton declaring Victorians were "scared to go out to restaurants" because of "African gang violence".
Kwar says those comments did nothing but fuel discrimination and misconceptions about African-Australians.
"These kids aren't born bad. They fall into the wrong crowd for survival. For friendship," he said.
Which is exactly what landed 18-year-old Monicka Biar in a courtroom two years ago.
She was "a bit antisocial" in high school. She loved the library and preferred to be alone and read rather than party and drink.
But like all teenagers, she also wanted to fit in and quickly found out it wasn't going to happen in the world of books.
"People didn't want to be friends with someone who was African," Monicka says.
"People didn't say it outright — I tried to make friends with Caucasians in the library. There weren't many African people in there."
It wasn't just schoolkids who didn't accept her. It was the school system itself.
When she was 15, Monicka showed up at school with elaborate braids in her hair adorned with white cloth.
It wasn't a fashion statement: Monicka had the braids for a South Sudanese cultural celebration the coming weekend.
"The school told me to take it all out."
It was against school policy for any colour to be in students' hair, Monicka said.
"I noticed other students had highlights in their hair and they were allowed to have that.
"So I just left school that day."
Ostracised from the school system, Monicka turned towards anyone who would accept and befriend her.
Weeks out from her 17th birthday, Monicka went to a party on a Saturday night with people from school she barely knew.
"The peer pressure was there because I really wanted to have friends. I probably would have done anything to get their approval and join their group and a part of them knew I was needy."
It started in someone's home and ended up in the city.
Monicka tagged along with girls who told her to help them steal someone's phone.
The group rushed a woman on the street and snatched her phone. It was handed to Monicka who was told to run down a side street and hand it to someone else, but being a weekend there were "cops everywhere", she said.
And Monicka was arrested.
Luckily, her spotless record meant she avoided a criminal conviction but she wished more had been done beforehand to help her mental health and perhaps prevent the entire incident from occurring.
"When I watch the news, when there's an issue with a Caucasian person it's put down as mental illness, and when it's an African person it's a gang issue," she said.
"And as someone with mental health issues and a person of colour, I'm afraid for the younger generations who are growing up watching that [message].
"Black people can only commit crimes. They can't achieve things."
According to psychologist and lawyer James Ogloff, it's rare to find things that work in youth justice but there's one program that is showing signs of success: the Embedded Youth Outreach Program, or EYOP.
It began two years ago and partnered police officers patrolling the streets overnight in Melbourne's west and south-east with a youth worker who provides on-the-spot support and service referrals to young people to address the underlying issues driving crime.
The aim was to connect a child with services through the youth worker immediately after their first point of contact with police, rather than days, weeks or even months down the track.
Professor Ogloff is the director of the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science at Swinburne University and oversaw a review into the program.
He says he's a fan of EYOP because it gets to the heart of the problem.
"Usually what happens is young people are apprehended, arrested and processed in youth justice before any identification of their needs is made."
For young people, he says, a delay of even a few weeks before interventions into a child's mental health or addiction patterns are addressed "is quite extreme".
EYOP is overcoming that barrier.
Professor Ogloff found the program had successfully taught police officers more about the complex needs of children and taught youth workers how the justice system worked.
Unsurprisingly, the program revealed children who came into contact with police were experiencing multiple, complex psychological issues "related to offending and vulnerability".
The children didn't fit into a neat box: more than two-thirds of those identified through EYOP were experiencing at least three issues directly related to their likelihood to offend, including drug addiction and mental distress.
"I can definitely say, without them I would not be here now … seriously, I would be dead, I was lost, f***ed up," one young person said in the report.
"I didn't even know that there were people out there who could, would, help.
"They [EYOP] gave a shit, it was like a domino effect. Without that initial contact with them and the help they gave I would not have had that next service, and then the next, that helped me get me to where I am now."
Professor Ogloff says EYOP is "a very, very good investment for the state" because of its ability to create a chasm between children and offending by successfully referring them to services.
But its funding, which comes directly from Victoria Police, has only been secured until June.
Another investment the state has made is to Pasifika organisation Charis Mentoring.
The group runs programs at two western-suburb high schools for Pasifika students to learn from Pasifika leaders about where they come from and the values behind their culture, largely through sport and performing arts.
"There are more Pasifika kids born outside the islands and they struggle with their identity," says co-founder Tia Suemai.
"They feel like they aren't Tongan or Samoan enough."
Charis follows the New Zealand timetable for celebrations such as Samoan language week, because "Australia doesn't have anything like that".
Some of the boys charged with Solomone's death told Charis manager Lusa they walked past the classroom where the Pasifika programs were held at their school.
They had always wanted to join in, they said, but weren't allowed because they were constantly truant.
The program was being used as a reward, which Lusa said meant it didn't always reach the right students.
Just like Monicka, the boys couldn't find belonging at school and turned outwards, towards others also rejected from the mainstream system.
In the fallout of Solomone's death, the Victorian Government brought forward an additional $200,000 in funding for Charis to expand its Village Response Program.
Similar to EYOP, Village Response sees local Pasifika leaders and mentors patrol popular areas in the evening, such as shopping centres, parks and train stations to keep an eye on the kids.
While the funding boost has been welcomed by the organisation, Tia says it's disappointing "the response comes when we're already at the bottom of the cliff".
Despite the recent tragedies, Superintendent Hollowood believes it could have been a lot worse if the interventions like EYOP were not already in place.
But there's still a long way to go.
While a holistic approach to preventing crime has created positive changes for some families, Superintendent Hollowood said some socio-economic factors were more difficult to solve.
"Unfortunately there are some things early on that can be trigger moments for a life in crime, such as involvement in family violence," he said.
"If the kids are chronically truant and won't engage, that's a problem as well. When they constantly go missing and don't have guardianship and are associating with people who are quite often taking advantage of them, all these things are little trigger events that set up a young person down on the path that's inevitable.
"The solution is with all of us and finding a way through this. We can't just enforce our way out."
Posted Sun 3 Jan 2021 at 6:59pm Sunday 3 Jan 2021 at 6:59pm Sun 3 Jan 2021 at 6:59pm , updated Tue 5 Jan 2021 at 12:14am Tuesday 5 Jan 2021 at 12:14am Tue 5 Jan 2021 at 12:14am
