The murder of South Guildford mum Georgia Lyall late last month by her bikie ex-partner Luke Noormets shocked and outraged West Australians.
The attack left Ms Lyall’s young son with Noormets an orphan and devastated her friends, family and the State.
Then, West Australians were outraged all over again to discover that Noormets was out on parole at the time of the murder-suicide for an earlier shocking act of violence.
In 2019, Noormets was sentenced to seven years in jail for abducting, beating and hog-tying a drug dealer before dousing him in petrol, setting him on fire and waterboarding him. That attack, described as “cold-blooded torture” by District Court Judge Troy Sweeney lasted 13 hours and only ended when his victim escaped.
It was, in Judge Sweeney’s words “vicious, highly violent, callous and utterly lacking in empathy” and Noormets showed no remorse through his trial. But just a few years later, after serving only five years of that seven-year sentence, Noormets was allowed out of jail.
The Prisoners Review Board determined he posed an “acceptable risk to the community” and “had no previous history of violence”. A year later, Ms Lyall was dead by his hand.
Now, West Australians will be outraged yet again by the fact that the PRB was wrong in its assertion that the attack for which he was sentenced in 2019 was his first violent attack. Court documents show Noormets had a history of domestic violence, having been fined in 2012 for trespass, wilful damage, breaching a police order as well as breaching his bail.
Hindsight is of course 20:20. The PRB had no way to know that Noormets would take Ms Lyall’s life and orphan his own son.
But it should have known that he was a violent, dangerous man who had little regard for the lives and safety of others.
How it was determined that the risk he posed to the community was “acceptable” is hard to fathom.