'Distressing and upsetting': Autistic man brutally bashed in Melbourne's north-east

All right. Now, on this program, since I've started, um, over the last three years, I've covered a lot of crime involving, [laughs] as if you listen regularly, as you would know, involving youth offenders. But this is one of the more distressing and upsetting cases that I've ever heard of. So, um, and, and these, these alleged offenders are now, um, in police custody, some of them, so I do need to be careful what I say. But this is what happened on Monday. Now, this is a wider set of crimes that occurred involving multiple victims. But basically a youth gang, I've been told the youngest was ten years old, ranging to seventeen years of age. They set upon an autistic twenty-six-year-old man who was on his way home from his disability social group. They ripped off his headphones. He uses these headphones for sensory relief. They punched, kicked, and stomped on his head. One of the victims... Oh, sorry, one of the offenders grabbed his bag and smashed it up and broke his belongings in front of him. He had a phone and a laptop. They were wrecked. But the twenty-six-year-old man, um, is particularly upset about his collectible Transformers figurines. They're very, very important to him, and they're two hundred dollars each. Police acted very swiftly in this case, and one of the youth offenders was actually hospitalized because they were bitten by a dog. I understand it was four girls and one boy that were involved in this crime. Um, it is so distressing. The victim, um, was so badly hurt, he was taken to hospital. Brad is on the line now, and Brad is his dad. Brad, thank you for speaking to me.

That's okay. Thanks for having me on.

I'm so sorry that this happened to your son. How is he?

Um, he's doing, doing pretty well, all things considered. Um, you know, he's still, still got his sense of humor and making some, some jokes here and there, which is good. And, um, just been a long week for him with the, the, you know, the night in emergency and dealing with the police and making statements, all that sort of stuff and-

And, and how badly was he injured?

Um, like he was... It's cuts and bruises. Luckily, there was no, like, internal damage or anything really serious, but we didn't know that at the time, so we had to go and get him, get him assessed. Um, but he seems to be like, in the long term, physically, like he, he seems to be pretty okay.

Oh, I can't imagine-

He's very lucky.

I can't imagine what you and your family have been going through, and especially the, the importance of him having his, his freedom and his confidence to go out and about on his own.

I think that's the thing is, like, he's worked really hard to, to be independent and learn, you know, to use public transport to get around without needing assistance and things like that. And now I think that might potentially, you know, have, have him, you know, not wanting to, to do it as much, especially at night. So that's gonna be one of the things we'll need to-

Yeah

... try to help him with again.

And how, how is, how important is the social group to him that he attends?

Um, look, it's... He's, he's not an extremely social person. He doesn't have a lot of friends, so that, that's, you know, one of