‘Too scared to go anywhere’: fear and anger as community reels from brutal killing of two boys in Melbourne’s west

Victoria grapples with ‘cancer of youth gang crime’ after machete murders of Dau Akueng, 15, and Chol Achiek, 12, in Cobblebank

Dau Akueng’s friends are on edge. Terry Koumides, who first met Dau in 2020 through a youth basketball program, says he escorted three of Dau’s friends this week to buy suits for his funeral. All three teenagers feared stepping into busy shopping centres after the brutal murder of 15-year-old Dau last week.

“They’re too scared to go anywhere,” said Koumides. “These populated areas have now been deemed unsafe.”

Dau sometimes told his basketball coach, Manny Hendrix, he was nervous about walking from the bus stop to training.

The fatal stabbing of Dau and his friend, 12-year-old Chol Achiek, in Cobblebank in Melbourne’s west last Saturday has reignited debate over the city’s youth gang crime. Eight masked assailants armed with machetes and long-edged weapons attacked the pair, who were returning home from a local basketball game.

Responding to the attacks, the Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, said she wanted “local solutions” that come from the community, alongside government action, to fight the “cancer of youth gang crime”. The state’s chief police commissioner has backed calls for tougher sentences for youth offenders while frontline youth services say early intervention programs must be shielded from funding cuts.

Allan said she would convene the government’s existing South Sudanese Australian Youth Justice Expert Working Group, noting community leaders were enduring a “profound sense of loss and pain”.

Maker Mayek, a lawyer and South Sudanese-Australian community leader, said people were “reeling” from the murders.

“It’s the sheer brutality of it,” he said. “I haven’t seen this happen before and in the most brutal way; hearing Chol crying for help while he was being hacked to death mercilessly.”

Dau’s father, Elbino Akueng, said his son was returning home from playing basketball at a stadium in Cobblebank down the road when he was attacked. Chol’s father, Chuti Ngong, said his son was waiting for his mother to pick him up before the ambush. Police said it had “the hallmarks of a youth gang crime” and may have been a case of mistaken identity. There is no suggestion the boys’ attackers were South Sudanese-Australian, nor that the two victims were involved in youth crime.

The horrific deaths have brought into sharper focus issues regarding crime in the state, and Allan nominated the South Sudanese-Australian community as one that needed support.

Lual Akech, the father of Aguer Akech, a 17-year-old who was stabbed to death in 2019, said the ongoing loss of South Sudanese-Australian boys and young men at the end of blades was torturous for his community. Aguer’s murder remains unsolved.

“We’re all fed up; we don’t know what to do,” he said. “We don’t have answers. And when you don’t have answers, it can kill you slowly.”

Aguer and his four siblings were set to leave Melbourne for a safer life in Africa shortly before he was killed, Akech said. His other children left soon after the murder and are still there.

Mayek said he also knew of families who had resorted to hiding their children in interstate hotel rooms before travelling overseas to countries in Africa because they faced threats of being killed if they left a gang or refused to join one.

Premier under pressure

In parliament this week, Allan faced sustained pressure in the wake of the fatal stabbings. It began in a caucus meeting on Tuesday, when two of her MPs asked her directly what she was planning to do to address “out-of-control” crime in the state.

In response, the premier conceded that the government needed to do more. According to MPs, she left the door ajar to further changes to the laws – telling them “we need to consider our criminal justice settings” – as well as more support at a community level.

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While Victoria’s five fastest-growing crimes are all property offences, children are over-represented in serious and violent crimes, the latest crime statistics show.

Youth offending also grew in the three months to March 2025, with crimes committed by children aged 10 to 17 up by 17.9%.

In March, the Victorian parliament passed what Allan touted as “the toughest bail laws in the country”, and last month approved stricter bail conditions for serious repeat offenders along with new “post and boast” laws targeting criminals who film their offending.

A statewide ban on machetes also came into effect last week, which will carry penalties of up to $47,000 in fines or up to two years’ imprisonment. An amnesty for people to surrender the weapons – with 45 disposal bins at police stations – is in place until 30 November. Allan told reporters on Wednesday almost 500 had been surrendered since 1 September.

Victoria’s opposition leader, Brad Battin, will use this weekend’s Victorian Liberal state council meeting to make an election pledge to introduce Jack’s law – a Queensland law that permits police to randomly detain any person to search them with a metal detecting wand – in the state if elected next year. Under a $100m plan, a Coalition-run government would also establish a youth crime prevention program and residential service for repeat and serious offenders. The Allan government has not ruled out implementing Jack’s law.

Several Labor MPs said there were few levers left to pull at parliament that would not have unintended consequences on vulnerable communities.

They instead highlighted a need for more support at a community level, noting that with tight budgetary constraints and the end of Covid-19 grants, several programs had either shut down or lost funding. A spokesperson for the state government said they would continue to listen to the community, experts and police, and pointed to $135m in this year’s budget to support at-risk young people and keep communities safe.

Crime prevention programs cry out for funding

The Youth Junction (TYJ), based in Melbourne’s west, runs crime prevention programs to divert young people away from offending.

Its chief executive, Blake Edwards, stressed the importance of investing in prevention programs and said amnesty bins for people to hand in machetes alone “won’t solve the problem” of knife crime.

“We’ve yet to meet a young person who says they carry a weapon because there’s nowhere to bin it. What they tell us is they’re scared, angry, or feel they have no other choice,” he said.

Edwards said the Victorian government had not renewed funding in this year’s state budget for two of TYJ’s crime prevention programs – the Youth Behavioural Change Program and NorthWest Safe. They are now being run from the charity’s own cash reserves.

Both were independently evaluated and found to reduce offending, build protective factors and reduce long-term costs to the justice system.

Edwards said unless the funding decision was reversed, the programs would need to end by mid-2026.

This year TYJ ran a pilot of a bladed weapons diversion program – Sharp Choices – also from its cash reserves.

The organisation’s program manager, Eamon Brockenbrough, said participants reported the early intervention program helped them learn how to set boundaries and better express their emotions. It also educated them on the long-term impact of carrying a weapon and helped them formulate safety plans if they felt threatened.

He said the program was designed to respond to young people saying they carried weapons as a result of feeling unsafe on public transport and in their communities.

Dau’s father called for youth gang members – including those he believes killed his son – to face tougher penalties in comments to the Herald Sun.

“Keep them locked up,” Akueng said.

But lawyers and workers within the youth justice sector are troubled that increasing the number of prosecutions of young offenders, while hardening bail and with possible further tinkering to come around sentencing, appears to be the only focus of government and police.

They are convinced the focus should instead be on addressing the social issues that lead to crime, and offering alternatives to gang life for those who become ensconced in it.

They also say more time in custody is not the answer, nor is targeting all youth offenders rather than youth gangs, especially those increasingly doing the dirty work of serious organised crime groups.

In the past month, Victorian courts have heard how two youth offenders continued to engage in gang behaviour in detention, including using phones to instigate aggression against rival gangs outside, and threatening behaviours against other detainees.

‘Let’s get kids home safe’

While Dau expressed safety fears to Hendrix, he was determined to continue training. He dreamed of one day playing in the NBA.

After meeting Dau in 2017, Hendrix spearheaded a youth development program based at the Collingwood Basketball Association. It included basketball training, boxing and martial arts alongside social support.

It also provided mental health sessions, study halls with tutors and hot meals for participants.

But the program ended in 2023 when grant money from the state and federal governments ran out.

Mayek said it was vital that grassroots sports programs had funding to transport participants to and from games and training. He also pointed to better engagement with schools – where he said children were sometimes forced or threatened to join gangs – as part of the solution.

Hendrix said Dau joined his high-performance basketball program, run in partnership with his organisation Airtime Academy and Victoria University, that launched in July.

The program had been trying to raise funds for a bus in the months before Dau’s death, Hendrix said.

Hendrix argues door-to-door transportation should be a priority for all sporting associations.

“Let’s get kids home safe. Let’s start there,” he said.