When 
Arun Kumar was killed in his Henderson dairy in 2014, a family lost a son, a husband and a father.
I met with the family the day after Arun died and vividly remember the heartbreak, the sorrow, the sense of loss and the incomprehension of how a 13-year-old, accompanied by a 12-year-old, could have committed this crime.
The boy who stabbed Arun has to take responsibility for the act he committed whatever his own background circumstances.
Preventing tragedy
However in working out how to prevent a tragedy like this happening again, we have to consider why it was that he committed this act and what might have been done to prevent it. Friends of Arun would consider the six-year-prison term the 13-year-old was given as light, and it is in the context of the family’s loss which is forever.
Worst of all, after six years in prison and still a teenager, what will he be like when he emerges from prison? Even if he had been sentenced to life imprisonment it would not have brought Arun back to his family.
No sentence is compensation for a life lost.
With crime, a fence at the top of the cliff to prevent a wrongdoing is better than an ambulance at the bottom which can only ever deal inadequately with the consequences of a criminal act.
Important lessons
There are many lessons to be learned from what we have found out about the boy who killed Arun.
He was one of 11 children to a mother who drank alcohol heavily and smoked drugs during pregnancy. Each of these unborn babies would have been vulnerable to foetal alcohol syndrome and damaged irreparably before birth.
Politically correct or not, a responsible society would have intervened earlier either to stop drug and alcohol use during pregnancy or to ensure the use of a long-lasting contraceptive. No mother has the right to damage her babies in the way that this one did.
Dysfunctional family
The mother used ‘P’ and heroin in front of the children and Child Youth and Family (CYF) received 20 notifications about the family, including 10 for violence but did not remove the children from this damaging environment.
The boy sustained serious brain injury when he was hit by a car aged eight but received no rehabilitation treatment.
Suicide attempt
He tried to kill himself at school aged 9 but was not treated by the youth mental health clinic. He was provided with synthetic cannabis by his mother and became addicted yet was still left in her care.
By the time he enrolled in high school, he had been in eight schools in eight years.
He was more often truant from school than he was there.
Again there was no intervention to stop his slide into anti-social behaviour and crime promoted by his home environment.
Time and again the system failed. The cost is the life of a decent man and the expense and wasted life of a young teenager who may spend much of the rest of his life in and out of jail.
If we had put the time and money we ought to have in early intervention there would have been a much better chance of changing the outcome.
The government must invest in intensive intervention at the start of an at-risk child’s life, when it will be cheaper, more effective and better able to avoid tragedies such as the death of Arun Kumar.
Phil Goff is former Foreign Affairs, Trade and Justice Minister and has been Member of Parliament for almost 35 years. Elected from Mt Roskill, he is today Labour Party’s Spokesperson for Ethnic Affairs and Auckland Issues.
Photo :
Murder Victim Arun Kumar
