Innocence was murdered
Malachi Subecz had family who loved and cared for him. But his life ended hundreds of kilometres away from them, in a cabin where he was subjected to daily pain and humiliation. Michelle Duff reports.
At the end of a small green paddock there is a house. And at the back of that house there is a cabin. And in that cabin, a small boy was tortured until he died.
On Wednesday, a quiet rain falls. On Thursday, the adult who was supposed to be caring for the boy was sentenced to prison for 17 years for murder. But the day before, a small squat house sits low underneath a cloudy sky, the road stretching away into the fog.
What was the last thing Malachi Subecz saw before he lost consciousness? It wasn’t his mum, who he’d lost to jail four months earlier. It wasn’t his beloved cousins, wanting to play tag, or any of the aunties and uncles who loved him and were trying to get him back, though he wouldn’t have known that, isolated hundreds of kilometres away.
Maybe the sky was blue that day, and the 5-year-old could pick a sliver and focus on that, imagining a rainbow.
There is nothing out here, a strip of farmland in Te Puna, 10 minutes north of Tauranga. A clutch of houses with an orchard behind, an empty marae, hedges, fences, grass.
This is where murderer Michaela Barriball and her accomplice Sharron Barriball grew up with their father, Chris Barriball, and where Malachi’s mother, Jasmine Cotter, thought her child would be safe. It was a functional household, the court would later hear, with plenty of food and other children living there.
Yet, after gaining custody of him, a cabin was placed behind the house where Barriball lived with Malachi and subjected him to daily pain and humiliation, including holding him up by his hair and slamming him into walls, depriving him of food, holding his head underwater, locking him outside in his underwear, slapping him, burning him with an object, and pretending to punch him when he walked past.
She sent numerous texts to her partner, Guri Dhillion, on multiple occasions, which the defence would later characterise as ‘‘cries for help’’. On the day she scalded Malachi with an object, a deep wound still visible at the time of his death that left him screaming on the couch, her messages included, ‘‘He should be in hospital . . . he just quiet on the couch . . . but he looks sooo sad’’.
‘‘I wanna take him to hospital, but I’m f...ing scared asf man,’’ she texted her sister, who would later instruct her own teenage son to hide Malachi’s bloodstained clothes when she knew police were on the way to the property.
An adult could run across the paddocks maybe, yell out to a neighbour, reach out to a friend. But for Malachi there was no escape. Who else saw? A neighbour stands behind a sliding door, but doesn’t want to help. ‘‘Last time a reporter came here you didn’t write very nice things about them,’’ she says. ‘‘I don’t want to get involved.’’
Less than a fortnight before inflicting the blunt force trauma that put him into a coma, Barriball took Malachi to a family dinner where he was hunched over, had a partly healed burn and could barely walk. Family members were concerned about him, but she brushed them off.
She lied to Malachi’s mother, who wanted to video-call her son, saying there was no wifi.
Cotter wasn’t the only one who tried to see him. Raj Thandi, Cotter’s former husband, was Malachi’s stepdad and raised him from when he was three months old.
He and Cotter split up in mid2020, but Malachi still called him dad, and he was a part of his life.
Thandi tried multiple times to see Malachi while the boy was in Barriball’s care. He got to see him once, when Barriball brought him to Bayfair, in Tauranga, for a visit.
‘‘I bought them some food, I bought him some raisins, he loved raisins,’’ Thandi told Stuff. ‘‘I looked after my boy. Then I walked him out to the car, and he didn’t want to get in it, he just kept crying. Now I know why.’’
Aunty Helen Menzies earlier told Stuff how the Wellingtonbased family had contacted
Malachi’s daycare, the courts and Oranga Tamariki about concerns for Malachi’s safety from the moment his mum was jailed.
In her victim impact statement, Jasmine Cotter’s niece, Megan Cotter, who was seeking custody, said she and her husband were kept awake at night wishing they had driven to Tauranga and grabbed him.
‘‘My husband and I obsess over this thought, what if we’d just gone and taken him and not waited for the right way? Malachi could still be alive today. What if, what if, what if.
‘‘In the end I couldn’t protect Malachi, us adults couldn’t protect Malachi, we failed. That’s what haunts me.’’
Barriball took him to the doctor with her father Chris, but not to seek medical attention for the extensive burn. It was instead to get a letter to say he had no extra needs so she could keep custody of him, for which she was getting the benefit.
For a while, Barriball took Malachi to Abbey’s Place, a daycare centre an 8km drive away in Brookfield. He had visible injuries, which staff photographed. Police found those photos during the investigation into Malachi’s death.
Yet the daycare did not report these injuries to Oranga Tamariki or any other agencies.
The daycare’s owners, listed as Craig and Marina Williams, would not engage with Stuff. ‘‘Sorry I don’t know what you’re talking about,’’ said a man who answered to Craig on Craig’s number, before hanging up.
A woman at their home address wouldn’t answer any questions or confirm her name.
At the daycare, a small converted house where flax name tags on a wall displayed about half a dozen names, a woman who identified herself as a cleaner said she couldn’t help. Had she met the boy? ‘‘What boy?’’ she replied.
‘I always told him: you are smart, you are strong, you are brave’
Before walking into the High Court at Rotorua, there is a moment when Sharron Barriball, hood pulled low, is standing metres from Cotter, who has been brought to the court from Auckland Women’s Prison to witness her former friend’s sentencing.
Cotter sobs audibly on and off throughout proceedings, comforted by police and a family member, and has to leave the courtroom at least once when Judge Paul Davison is detailing the worst of the abuse.
The public gallery is packed with Malachi’s family and supporters. There are a handful of supporters for the Barriball sisters, and two more carloads outside. The Barriballs are expressionless in the dock.
In court, Cotter said she met the Barriball family while working with them, three years earlier. When she gives her victim impact statement, it is in a clear and steady voice. She wishes she could turn back time.
‘‘Michaela has taken from me the one person who ever meant anything to me,’’ she said. ‘‘I considered Michaela family. I trusted her with my child.’’
She loved Malachi with all her heart, spending one special day with him each week on Tauranga waterfront, eating fish and chips, visiting Timezone or playing on the wharf. She’d cook him her speciality, spaghetti and eggs on toast, and they would watch dinosaur videos.
‘‘When he was naughty I didn’t discipline him hard, and I just mothered him with love and hugs. I made it my daily promise that he would never go to bed sad,’’ she said.
‘‘I always told him: you are smart, you are strong, you are brave, and you are important.’’
She was not coping with his loss, suffering from PTSD, and did not know how she would go on. He was a part of her, she said.
‘‘I want to think I was a good mum. I’m scared to get out of here, prison . . . [All] I had to look forward to was life with him and being with him. That life has been taken from me.’’
Seeing Malachi, malnourished and fighting for breath, on life support was the most frightening moment of her life. She still could not believe Michaela had shown no remorse. ‘‘She has taken away the love of my life.’’
Before her, the rest of the family spoke of their pain.
‘‘Because of you [Michaela Barriball], he will always be forever 5. I will never ever say your name, I will forget you, but not what you did. Malachi will always be remembered, that is the difference between him and you,’’ said Helen Menzies.
‘‘I hope what you did to Malachi and his voice, him saying ‘Stop’, play over and over again for the rest of your life. You could have rung us.’’
Her husband, Peter, spoke in even more harrowing terms of the way his outlook had been changed. ‘‘I have never known such anger, such a horrific, allconsuming, all-fearful hatred for any other human beings in my life. I hate this world and the horrible foul things people do in it. My nightmares have changed me forever.’’
‘‘In the end I couldn’t protect Malachi, us adults couldn’t protect Malachi, we failed. That’s what haunts me.’’ Megan Cotter
Lies upon lies
At the end, Judge Davison speaks of the ‘‘lies upon lies upon lies’’ told by Barriball. The daily assaults, a complete lack of insight into her offending even in the pre-sentence report, where she still denied the injuries causing his death, calling Malachi instead ‘‘clumsy and accident-prone’’.
In sentencing Barriball to life with a 17-year non-parole period, and six months for her sister for perverting the course of justice, his message is one of communal responsibility.
‘‘As members of society we all have a responsibility for those among us who are especially vulnerable and need care and protection,’’ he says. ‘‘A number of opportunities had arisen when adults could have taken steps to intervene, but they did not.
‘‘That is the clear lesson that everybody should take from what has happened here. Preventing [violence] will take a fully committed community response. For Malachi’s family, this is a high price to pay for this lesson.’’
Outside court, Malachi’s family said they would not stop until Oranga Tamariki and any other agency that could have stopped the abuse had been held to account.
At the end of a small green paddock there is a house. And at the back of that house there is a cabin. And in that cabin, a small boy was tortured.
In the happy version, the adults, the community, who saw and heard the pain of a vulnerable, once cheerful child, acted. And he lived.
But they did not. So in the end, he died.