REMEMBERING BALIN
A single stab to the heart took the life of their much-loved son. Now Balin Stewart’s parents Michael and Kerri-lyn are on a mission to stop the knife-carrying culture rampant among teens
It’s not a long walk, 10 metres at the most from Michael Stewart’s front door to the patch of lawn on the corner. But it’s never easy. Every Thursday, at 11.20pm, Michael pours a drink and walks out into the night to have a chat with his 16-year-old son, Balin. Could be about anything: that time Balin snapped his kneecap in a parkour spill, the surf, the kooky kid’s fascination with Japanese opera, trampolining, the state of his room, how his cryptocurrency is performing. Might be about how Balin’s mum Kerri-lyn is doing, or what his mates are up to.
At 11.30pm, Michael goes quiet. For a minute. As the traffic hums and the surf rolls in, Michael sinks deep into the memory of Balin. The son Michael tried so desperately to revive that Thursday night in January this year. The son who died, right here, so close to home, from a single stab wound to his heart.
Then Michael walks back inside, to a grief-ridden Kerri-lyn and a home filled with the presence of their boy.
“So as far as moving away from here,” says Michael, “that would be absolutely out of the question.”
Of course, it’s tough to see the place your son died every day, says Kerri-lyn. “But this is his home,” she says of their modest, low-set brick house at Buddina on the Sunshine Coast.
“There’s more good than bad here. No, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. They’ll have to drag me out of here.”
Even if they wanted to leave, adds Kerri-lyn, 44, a real estate agent, they couldn’t. This place is a haven for all Balin’s mates – teenagers still struggling with the loss of their up-beat, offbeat friend. It was their hangout place when Balin was alive, crowding into his bedroom to listen to music, chat and watch Youtube videos on his Xbox.
Now they come, alone or in groups, boys and girls, to talk and vent or just lie on his bed and cry.
“After it happened, all these kids were here one day and I walked in and said, ‘Do you mind if I join you?’,” recalls Michael, 55, a fleet manager. They talked music. Michael knew the wide-ranging styles of music Balin liked but not the songs that meant the most to him. Balin’s mates played them for Michael.
“It’s a pretty special memory to have 20 kids in a room, all hugging each other and crying and listening to his favourite music,” Michael says. “This is a place for them and us. So no, we couldn’t leave.”
What they can do, what the Stewarts are determined to do, is make a lot of noise about the growing trend for young people to carry knives.
“We got blindsided by this,” says Michael, who has two other children, Rebekah Devietti, 36, and Jacob Stewart, 25.
“You know, it’s the Sunshine Coast; it’s not New York City, it’s not LA. It’s the Sunshine Coast. We couldn’t fathom it at the time that a 16 or 17-year-old would ever think about carrying a knife in public.”
They plan to inform others; youth, parents, educators, the wider community. They’ve established the Balin Stewart Foundation to give talks to teenagers and hold events to get the message out, to show the the life-changing consequences of popping a knife in a pocket.
“So many people said to us afterwards, ‘We didn’t know, we didn’t know,’ Michael says. “We went, ‘You know what, this is no longer something we should do, we have to do it.’ It’s our duty – our mission is to get this in your face. To make sure everybody does have an idea about this knife-carrying culture.”
Because maybe, says Kerri-lyn, if they’d been warned, Balin would still be here, filling this house with more than memories.
No one is making a sound in this small lecture
room at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital. No one but Michael who is looking out to a sea of young faces, asking them to think about the person they love most. Picture them, he says, as he recounts what happened to Balin.
“You race over, you have a look and you see a stab wound to their chest,” he says. “There’s not a lot of blood, so you think, ‘They’ll be OK.’
“As you get closer, you hear a loud gasp. They’re sucking for breath. There’s a long, drawn out one. Then nothing.
“You start to slap them on the face. ‘Hang in there, hang in there, breathe, keep breathing. Stay with me!’ And there’s another laboured gasp. All of a sudden, silence.
“You think, ‘What do I do, what do I do?’ And then one final last gasp. At the time you don’t know it, but that’s their last breath … You start beating away on their chest … Your lips seal against theirs and as you blow in, they gurgle. It’s not like a dummy. This is when I started to panic.”
But he didn’t expect Balin to die. It was such a small amount of blood.
At home after the speech, Michael tells how rain started bucketing down as the paramedics arrived. They lifted Balin into the ambulance to start defibrillation and Michael dashed inside to get changed.
Kerri-lyn had done the same. They’d be going to the hospital.
By now, the other boy was in a police car. The teenage boy who’d slumped to the ground, distraught, as Balin struggled to breathe.
So many questions. But the whys and whos would have to wait. A police officer was coming to talk with the Stewarts. Good, thought Kerri-lyn, he’ll tell us which hospital we have to get to.
“And he said, ‘I’m so sorry to tell you this but the ambulance has just told me that Balin has passed’,” Kerri-lyn says. “I don’t remember much after that.”
Says Michael: “Kerri-lyn collapsed and just started screaming, ‘No’, and time stood still. It just froze. It was almost like you see in the movies when a stun grenade goes off; there’s a ringing and a focus but it’s a bit blurry. All I saw was Kerri-lyn, I didn’t see anybody else. I just held on to Kez.”
Balin had been stabbed once. The blade had pierced his heart. His heart stopped beating. That’s why there was so little blood.
He said, ‘I’m so sorry to tell you this but the ambulance has just told me that Balin has passed’. I don’t remember much after that
It was incomprehensible. Only 30 minutes earlier, Michael had been sitting with Balin on the couch. They’d been watching a replay of Michael’s V8 simulator race while they chatted. It was January 20 and Balin had returned home from a party with about 10 mates about 9.30pm. Soon after, the Stewarts had told the mates to go home. It might be school holidays but it was a Thursday night; they had neighbours.
Michael started getting ready for bed about 10.45pm, leaving Balin to watch television. Balin didn’t mention going outside.
Just how Balin came to go outside, and what he thought he was going to, is now something for the Children’s Court. The 17-year-old boy has been charged with murder and is yet to face trial. Police have alleged it was about a dispute over a relationship. There was a girl on the scene; a girl who was part of the group that came back to the Stewarts’ from the party. She was the one who rapped on their bedroom window to alert them to the tragedy. The 17year-old boy, a former love interest of the girl, had not been in the Stewart’s house.
People have asked the Stewarts what they want to see happen to the teenager but they’re not diverting their energy there. “We want our son back, that’s what we want,” Michael says. “So beyond that …”
But Michael does think about the boy’s parents. “Not that I can put myself in his shoes but the alleged perpetrator’s father, how would he be feeling? If Balin had done that, what emotion do you go through? It’s not on the same level as us but damn close, it’s got to be.
“It’s terrible for everybody. No one’s a winner out of this. We all suffer.”
Which is why talks like the one Michael gave as part of the P.A.R.T.Y. trauma injury prevention program at the Sunshine Coast hospital are so important to the Stewarts.
After recounting that dreadful night to the young people sitting quietly in the lecture room, Michael gives them some statistics. The figures were provided to him by Queensland Police Senior Sergeant Ken Murray, who was instrumental in setting up the Live Your Life Without a Knife campaign in Logan in 2019.
They show that, of youths who carry a knife, 60 per cent do so for protection, arming themselves “just in case” they feel threatened. Another 30 per cent do it for notoriety or, as Stewart describes it, “because it’s cool”. Just 10 per cent intend using the knife in a crime.
So, he says, 90 per cent of people who carry knives don’t want to cause harm.
Yet knife injuries and fatalities are a growing scourge, with Queensland Police statistics showing the number of knife-related offences occurring in public increased 33 per cent from 2016 to 2020.
One lad who lost his life was Jack Beasley, a 17-year-old out for a night with friends in
Surfers Paradise on December 13, 2019, when he was stabbed in the heart after being followed by a group of youths. Five teenage boys, aged between 15 and 18, were charged over his killing.
Two juveniles have pleaded guilty, one to murder, one to manslaughter. Earlier this month, the other three, including the then 18year-old Ma-mal-j Toala, were found not guilty of manslaughter. Another victim was 15-yearold Angus Beaumont who died on March 13, 2020, after an altercation near a skate park in Redcliffe. He was stabbed in the heart, too. Two 14-year-olds have been found guilty of murder.
Michael points out some facts to the group. Just carrying a knife in public is illegal, he says. It can get you a maximum of one year in jail. Pull it out and start waving it around, and that’s a possible seven years. Injure someone, and you’re facing 12.5 years. But it might be classified as attempted murder, which can carry a life sentence. Or someone could end up dead, someone you had no intention of killing.
“Why? Because you picked up a knife one day,” Michael says. “It might be in your school bag, in your backpack. You’ve never used it. But one day, you pull it out. And your life is over.”
And if someone pulls a knife on you, what do you do? One of the teenagers suggests they could fight. Stewart is non-committal. He asks again. Another small voice pipes up: “Run?”
“That’s the key. Your body is so fragile. You can’t block a knife; it goes straight through your skin. Just run.”
After Balin’s stabbing, friends and
acquaintances shared their stories: a parent found a knife in the bottom of a backpack, a kid took one to school. One person told of being at a market where a mother and father were buying a knife for their 14-year-old daughter for “protection” at a local skate park.
“That’s insane,” Michael says. “Here are parents saying commit a crime by carrying a knife in the first place.”
Driven by grief, Michael started researching knife crime. He read about the rise and rise of knife-carrying in the UK, how stabbings had got “out of control” in places like Manchester and Liverpool. He saw pictures of the Knife Angel, an 8m sculpture made of 100,000 knives that had been used in crimes or surrendered in amnesties, which is toured around Britain to educate young people about the dangers of carrying knives. He pored over statistics that suggested Australian youth were following a similar trajectory.
He read about Jack Beasley, and spoke with his parents Brett and Belinda about their support for a trial of portable metal-detecting wands in parts of the Gold Coast, aimed at flushing out knives. Police revealed in May that 133 weapons were seized during the 12-month trial, with an 850 per cent drop in wounding offences in Surfers Paradise in that period. The median age of offender was 19.
Work is under way to determine if wanding should become permanent, something the Stewarts support.
But was it really that bad on the Sunshine Coast? On Australia Day, six days after
Balin’s death, his mates wanted to do something in his honour. They gathered to paint a
mural bearing his name. Michael took the opportunity to ask them, about 60 teenagers, if they’d ever carried a knife, or thought about it, or knew someone who did. Seventy per cent said yes. It stunned Michael. “These are good kids,” he says. “These are amazingly good kids. I was just blown away. I would never have thought that regular kids in this area would be carrying knives. I expected maybe 20 per cent of them would say yes.”
Later that day, the teenagers, the Stewarts and friends went down to the beach. The plan was to throw flowers in the surf and listen to the kids talk about Balin, their quirky friend who loved the ocean. In no time, they were in the surf, clothes and all.
Someone guided Kerri-lyn in. She was smashed in the face by a wave, and as it washed over her, as those who loved Balin hugged and cried, she felt something other than numb. “That’s the day I woke up,” she says.
Now it’s time to alert the wider community to what’s going on with youths and knives.
“It’s a domino effect,” Kerri-lyn says.
“If you get a few kids carrying knives then other kids think, ‘Well, I’d better carry one, too, for protection’.”
Michael is taking on the education role. He knows some other programs have started up but argues they are largely aimed at youths already “on the other side of the track”. “What is missing is something aimed at somebody like Balin who was not in that realm, or even, from what we know, the alleged perpetrator.” He wants to get into as many schools, into the heads of as many kids, as possible.
They’ve got some cool things planned, too, with Kerri-lyn in charge of promotions. On September 9, one day after Balin’s birthday, they will host the Balin Forever Festival, a concert at the Sunshine Coast’s Nightquarter.
Balin loved to test his dexterity and coordination, so a skills fun day is also being planned, with competitions in juggling, soccer ball tricks, basketball spinning and one of
Balin’s favourites, the Japanese skill toy, kendama. Come the anniversary of his death, the Stewarts are keen for everyone to join them on a walk.
Not far from their home, a park bench has been installed overlooking the surf, with a plaque bearing Balin’s name and the words, “Forever loved, Forever young”. A tree has been planted in his honour at Point Cartwright.
Wearing Bin the Blade for Balin T-shirts, the crowd will walk from the chair, along Kawana Beach, to the tree, taking their memories of Balin with them – and their message that knifecarrying only leads to heartache.
Kerri-lyn’s hand reaches for Michael’s as he
tells how they’ve been changed forever by one knife brought along to a pointless teenage dispute. On Michael’s forearm is a tattoo of a smiling Balin wearing a white T-shirt, his trademark style. Balin’s name is on the T-shirt, the letters mimicking those on his bedroom door that spell out Balin, complete with a crooked letter L. It’s a family joke. He used to love tilting the L off kilter, messing with his mum’s need for order.