A web developer has been found guilty of murder after stabbing his own mother to death in front of paramedics while affected by a cocktail of drugs.
Callum Cameron claims he does not remember the night of August 10, 2020 when the then 27-year-old inflicted 62 stab wounds on Carol Cameron, originally from Scotland, at their home in St James in Perth’s south-east.
Cameron had admitted to manslaughter and said the killing was not deliberate because he was affected by chemicals including DMT, cannabis, antipsychotics and antidepressants, but Justice Joseph McGrath found the more serious charge proved.
In handing down the verdict on Friday following a WA Supreme Court judge-only trial, Justice McGrath said Cameron’s actions were ‘purposeful’.
‘This was not a spontaneous act of picking up a knife and stabbing the victim once,’ he said, reported the ABC.
The court heard how Ms Cameron, a 63-year-old nurse, had called paramedics in the early hours of the morning concerned her son had overdosed.
She told the operator he was ‘barely awake’ but not violent.
Ambulance officers arrived and found Ms Cameron helping him drink water in his bed and he became agitated when they attempted to take him to hospital.
Callum Cameron was high on a cocktail of drugs when his mother attempted to get him to go to hospital with paramedics and he carried out a frenzied stabbing attack on her
Family friends said Ms Cameron was a ‘good mother’ who’d tried to ‘put her troubled son on the right path’
One paramedic relayed back to base that he had an ‘unpredictable feel about him’ but they were ‘not under any direct threats’.
However, when Ms Cameron further pressed him to go with the ambulance officers he went to the kitchen where he retrieved a knife and she followed him.
Ambulance officer John Bowring said he lost sight of the pair, then heard Ms Cameron shouting ‘he’s stabbing me’ before she crawled on the floor out of the kitchen and back into his line of sight where the attack continued.
He immediately called in a ‘code black’ on his radio – a request for urgent police assistance – telling base ‘mate please, he’s stabbing the mum’.
Ms Cameron, a cancer ward nurse, called paramedics to the house (pictured) in St James, Perth, to help her son
When officers arrived they found Cameron on the couch with blood on his hands and Ms Cameron in another room. They were forced to restrain him with a taser when he again became agitated.
He was taken to hospital in an ambulance in which he repeatedly asked paramedics if his mother was going to be alright.
Justice McGrath found the attack was not pre-meditated and Cameron’s intoxication combined with his anger contributed to his decision to attack his mother, but that he was responsible and there was intent.
He will be sentenced in November.
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