BU Teen Planned Schoolmate’s Killing For Months, But Judge Says The ‘Plan’ Came From His Delusions

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The 15-year-old boy who fatally stabbed his 16-year-old schoolmate at a Bandar Utama school last year had been preparing for the killing for months

But Shah Alam High Court judge Adlin Abdul Majid rejected the prosecution's argument that this showed the boy, identified only as L, had rationally planned the murder of Yap Shing Xuen and understood what he was doing.

In her full grounds of judgment released yesterday, 23 September, Adlin said the evidence showed that the alleged plan was itself generated by the teenager's delusional system rather than by rational, self-interested thinking.

"The target was selected not by reason of any relationship, dispute, or rational motive, but by an erotomanic delusion attaching to a girl whom, as the evidence established, the child had never once spoken to or otherwise contacted," she said.

The boy chose a date linked to a mass killing

Adlin noted that the original date for the planned killing had been fixed to coincide with the anniversary of an atrocity committed 25 years earlier in another country.

The teenager had come to identify with the two young men responsible for the Columbine High School massacre in the US, as well as other mass killers.

The BU teen also assembled clothing piece by piece to replicate what the Columbine perpetrators had worn.

Words were also inscribed on knives at the instruction of a hallucinated voice he attributed to Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters.

The judge said these actions did not reflect the conduct of a rational person planning towards a real-world objective, but rather an act of delusional identification.

But he made no plans to escape

Adlin also rejected the argument that the teenager's ability to organise and sequence his actions showed that he understood the consequences of what he was doing.

She pointed out that he had not planned an escape, disposed of evidence, or taken steps to avoid being caught after the attack.

"A plan which was meticulously prepared as to matters of costume and inscription, yet totally indifferent to detection, risk and escape, is not, in my assessment, the plan of a rational, guilt-aware mind," she said.

The judge also said his behaviour after the attack supported the psychiatric evidence. He was seen calmly walking through the chaos of alarms and screams before stopping to retrieve and drink from his water bottle while still holding the knife.

Adlin said the behaviour corroborated the evidence that he had been experiencing dissociation during the attack.

The boy did not understand that the victim would really die

The judge also found that the teenager's psychotic illness had affected his understanding of what he was actually doing. She said the most telling evidence was that he did not grasp the finality of death and believed the victim would be reincarnated.

Adlin said simply knowing that a knife was being pushed into someone's abdomen and that the person would bleed was not enough to establish that he understood the nature of the act.

She found that the teenager had been deprived of the capacity to comprehend that he was taking the life of a living person, rather than carrying out a fantasy involving an object of his own delusional construction.

The High Court subsequently acquitted him of murder after finding that he was of unsound mind at the time of the incident.

However, the boy was ordered to be detained and treated at Hospital Bahagia Ulu Kinta in Perak at the pleasure of the Sultan of Selangor.