Two men have been jailed for three years in Western Australia for knocking a 14-year-old Aboriginal boy off his bicycle and leaving him to crawl home with a broken leg, in a case with similarities to the death of Kalgoorlie teenager Elijah Doughty.
Robert Peter Butson, 25, and Zachary Kane Armstrong, 22, were found guilty of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm, aggravated failure to stop and render assistance, failure to report an accident, criminal damage by fire, and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Sentencing the men at the supreme court in Perth on Friday, Justice Lindy Jenkins said the men had given chase in a car with “a deliberate intention to make him fear that he would be struck and threatened him with that fear”.
She said she hoped a sentence of three years would warn other like-minded offenders that “they cannot take justice into their own hands”.
The incident took place in Port Hedland, about 1,500km north of Perth, almost four months before Doughty was killed in Kalgoorlie by being knocked off a motorcycle by a non-Indigenous man, who suspected him of stealing and was chasing him in a four-wheel drive.
It has raised similar issues of racism in small WA towns. Jenkins said both men were of previously good character, and accepted a character reference for one of the men that said he was “certainly not a racist”.
Jenkins said Armstrong and Butson were at a gathering at Armstrong’s house in South Hedland on the early hours of 3 May, 2016 and decided to go after a group of Aboriginal children they saw testing the doors of cars parked out front. The victim was with the group but did not touch the cars.
The pair drove to Butson’s house, swapped cars into Butson’s mother’s Nissan Micra, put his dog in the back, and drove around until they saw a group of Aboriginal children on a vacant block called “the flats”.
“By this time, I’m satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that you had both decided to seek out any member of the group that you could find,” Jenkins said. “I find beyond reasonable doubt that your intention was to assault them, at least to the extent that you were going to stop them by physical force if that was required and to speak to them in an attempt to scare them off from doing what they had done earlier that night again.
“This decision was made in the context of Mr Armstrong having had previous instances of people breaking into his cars outside his house.”
On the flats the Nissan Micra followed the boy, who was riding a pushbike toward a nearby housing estate in the dark.
“[The boy was] by this stage, panicking,” she said. “He believed that the people in the car were going to assault him or hit his bike and knock him down. He thought that he may be seriously injured or he may die.”
The car knocked the bicycle from the back and the boy fell off. The men did not stop the car or report the accident, and Armstrong did not mention it to police when they arrived at his house later that day responding to his complaint about children breaking into cars.
The fall caused a splintered fracture to the boy’s tibia. He “crawled, hopped and dragged” himself several hundred metres to his home, where his parents called an ambulance. He was then flown to Perth for treatment.
Some days later the men drove the Micra out to bushland about 100km south of Port Hedland and burned it.
Armstrong was arrested by police on 31 May and Butson on 1 June. Both initially lied to police. Both also said they did not intend to hit the boy but Jenkins said it it was a “clearly foreseeable” outcome.
The men will be eligible for parole in late 2019.
