A remorseless thug who fatally stabbed a defenceless 17-year-old boy over a Philadelphia 76ers cap has been slammed as “cowardly” by a judge.
Joshua Horton was jailed for 13 years and six months in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Friday after a jury found the 20-year-old guilty of manslaughter.
“By the unprovoked, cowardly, brutal and entirely senseless act of violence you caused the death of a 17-year-old child named Maaka Hakiwai,” Justice Andrew Tinney said.
Horton launched a shocking 16-second attack on Maaka Hakiwai and his older brother Nathanial at a bus stop in Melbourne’s northwest in September 2019.
The brothers were heading to the gym when they were confronted by a man named Chol Kur and an underage boy who cannot be named.
The pair tried to steal a Philadelphia 76ers hats from the Hakiwai boys, and a fight broke out.
The underage teen had Maaka in a headlock when Horton ran into the melee and stabbed the 17-year-old through the heart.
It was a “vicious thrust”, Justice Tinney said.
He then turned the knife on Nathanial Hakiwai, but the 18-year-old survived the horrific attack that claimed his brother’s life.
Horton was also found guilty of intentionally causing serious injury over this assault.
“Your victims were young and doing nothing wrong when you decided to launch your attack on them,” Justice Tinney said.
He was not satisfied that Horton was truly remorseful and found he was a poor prospect of rehabilitation.
Devastated family members refused to accept the jury’s verdict and said the crime was a murder during an earlier hearing.
The boy’s heartbroken father Stirling Hakiwai said he got a phone call from his eldest screaming “Dad – Dad we’ve been stabbed”.
“My world as I knew it – is forever changed,” he said.
The boy’s maternal grandfather said it was a “grotesquely violent attack” on two innocent boys.
“We will never accept the verdict of the jury … in our eyes, it was a murder,” grandfather Allan Priester told the court.
The pair’s seven-year-old sister also wrote a statement about the loss of her beloved brother.
“I miss him chasing me around the house – he called me bubby,” the child said.
A “very, very bad person” killed her brother, she said.
“I remember crying at his funeral because I could never see him again, only in the ground or in the sky.”
The judge said Horton posed a high risk of reoffending, had an untreated personality disorder and two years after the attack had shown no remorse.
“The sentence must also manifest the denunciation … of the shockingly violent conduct you carried out against innocent young people for no good reason at all,” Justice Tinney said.
Horton was jailed for 13 years for manslaughter and intentionally causing serious injury and will be eligible for parole after spending nine-and-a-half years behind bars.
Kur and the underage boy pleaded guilty to robbery and will be sentenced on Friday afternoon.
More to come.
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