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Woman arrested for murder of eight children after stabbing in Cairns Cairns stabbings: mother arrested as community mourns eight children
(about 9 hours later)
A 37-year-old Cairns woman has been arrested for the murder of eight children, seven of them her own. Queensland police said they were considering murder charges against a Cairns woman as relatives struggled to fathom how a parent who was also a mother figure to extended family and friends could be accused of killing seven of her own children, as well as a niece, in Australia’s worst ever such case.
Police said the woman, who is also suspected of killing her niece, was “awake, lucid and able to speak”. The arrested woman, aged 37, remained under police guard in hospital on Saturday after the stabbing deaths of the eight children at her house in the north Queensland city’s suburb of Manoora a day earlier.
Detective inspector Bruno Asnicar said the woman was under guard in Cairns hospital where she was recovering from self-inflicted wounds. Four fathers and another mother from Cairns’s interwoven Indigenous communities have been left in mourning. For those hit hardest by one of Australia’s worst mass killings – the circumstances of which remained unclear – the case was impossible to fathom.
“At this stage we’re not looking for anyone else,” he told reporters. A cousin of the woman, who asked to be identified simply as Mr Stephen, told Guardian Australia that the woman was known locally as Big Mama – a figure who welcomed children from around the neighbourhood into her home and fed them.
Asnicar said police had found a number of “edged weapons, knives” in the house in Murray St, Manoora, Queensland. “It’s a tragedy but I still love her. She’s a relative, she’s blood, she’s an aunty, in the community kids know her,” he said. “But I still have love for her.”
He added that police had removed the bodies from the home and the coroner and pathologists would conduct autopsies and identify victims with the help of the family. The grief-stricken father of the niece – one of the eight children killed, who were aged between 18 months and 14 years – told the Australian Associated Press he had “lost a beautiful daughter … what for? What has she done?”
Asnicar said he expected the house would remain a crime scene for “another couple of days” with forensics experts continuing to search the scene for DNA evidence and signs of timelines in order to reconstruct the events on Friday morning. Mr Stephen, who grew up living near the accused woman, said the devastating incident took place a day after he had brought his own family up to Cairns from Brisbane for the Christmas holidays.
“It affects the family – myself as well because I have kids and they’re my nieces and nephews so it’s a big shock,” he said.
“It should be happy times but a tragedy like, it’s sort of like, a big step back.”
Grieving relatives of the children were travelling to Cairns from Brisbane, Rockhampton and the Torres Strait Islands.
“All of the other families are still at home processing. That’s all you can do,” Mr Stephen said.
Police said on Saturday that autopsies were being held and the bodies identified with the help of immediate family.
Queensland’s acting premier, Tim Nicholls, and its acting police commissioner, Brett Pointing, joined a vast number of people from the community throughout Cairns who paid tribute to the victims at an impromptu shrine of flowers and soft toys outside the crime scene.