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
‘‘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 how the Wellingtonbased family had contacted