Psychiatrist who took Bondi Junction killer Joel Cauchi off his anti-psychotic medication and ignored his mother’s concerns about his deteriorating mental state is unmasked

The psychiatrist who took Bondi Junction killer Joel Cauchi off his antipsychotic medication and failed to listen to his mother’s repeated concerns about his declining mental state has been unmasked. 

Queensland psychiatrist Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack can finally be identified as the specialist who treated Cauchi and weaned him off his powerful medication.

His mother, Michele Cauchi, contacted Dr Boros-Lavack’s clinic seven times to tell them that her son’s troubling schizophrenic symptoms were returning, but her fears were dismissed.

Cauchi was still off his drugs when he went into a ‘florid psychotic state’ and killed six people in his bloody rampage through the Westfield Shopping Centre in April 2024.

Dr Boros-Lavack’s treatment has come under fire after the details were revealed at the inquest into the massacre, but until today her identity has been kept secret by a legal gag.

Now Daily Mail Australia can identify her, and also reveal that her treatment was questioned at another inquest into the death of a 45-day-old baby.

Dr Boros-Lavack is a medical entrepreneur who – along with her former juice salesman husband – opened a ‘luxury’ psychiatric clinic in Queensland which went belly up within four years. 

This was just three years after a Tasmanian Coroner’s inquest found that Dr Boros-Lavack had given professional advice that an infant was safe to be in his mother’s care. Five days later the child was dead from inflicted brain injuries.  

Joel Cauchi’s psychiatrist has finally been unmasked as Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack (above). Dr Boros-Lavack took Cauchi off all anti-psychotic medication because he didn’t like the side effects despite the drugs successfully controlling his schizophrenia for years 

Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack took Joel Cauchi off the last-resort anti-psychotic drug Clozapine despite the mentally ill man’s severe ‘treatment-resistant’ form of the condition. At first, the psychiatrist refused to concede that Cauchi’s psychosis was the reason for his deadly rampage at the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre 

On Thursday afternoon, the NSW Coroner’s Court released Dr Boros-Lavack’s name and her colleagues who had treated Cauchi and testified at the inquest into Bondi Junction Westfield massacre.

The medical witnesses treated Cauchi at Dr Boros-Lavack’s now defunct Toowoomba Clinic west of Brisbane, where he was eased off Clozapine – the last resort anti-psychotropic drug which had successfully controlled his chronic schizophrenia for years. 

The clinic went into voluntary financial administration just 20 days after Cauchi’s rampage, which one witness in the inquest believed was an entirely avoidable tragedy. 

Suppression orders on Dr Boros-Lavack and her colleagues’ names expired at the conclusion of the psychiatric expert panel evidence component of the State Coroner’s inquest into last year’s Westfield tragedy.

The inquest is investigating what led up to the deaths of Dawn Singleton, 25, Jade Young, 47, Yixuan Cheng, 27, Ashlee Good, 38, Pakria Darchia, 55, and Faraz Tahir, 30, and that of Cauchi.

In under three minutes on the afternoon of April 13 2024, Cauchi, 40, used a Ka-Bar military knife to murder the five shoppers and one security guard, and injure ten others.

Dr Boros-Lavack, who set up a private medical clinic with her MBA graduate businessman husband Richard Lavack, initially told the inquest that Cauchi was not psychotic.

Instead, she said that stabbing to death six people was ‘likely due to his sexual frustrations and hatred towards women’.

Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack (above) is a medical entrepreneur who with her former juice salesman husband opened a ‘luxury’ psychiatric clinic in Queensland which went belly up within four years

The six victims of Joel Cauchi’s psychosis-driven murderous rampage, clockwise from top left, Ashlee Good, Faraz Tahir, Dawn Singleton, Pakria Darchia and Yixuan Cheng

Dr Boros-Lavack and her husband’s $9million luxury psychiatric clinic with massage and art rooms and a gym  (above) collapsed just 20 days after Joel Cauchi’s deadly rampage

The inquest heard that after Dr Boros-Lavack took Cauchi off Clozapine in 2019, his mother contacted the psychiatrist seven times about her son’s troubling behaviour.

Mrs Cauchi’s concerns were sparked by her son leaving notes around the family home saying he was under the control of Satan or demons, and the fact his gait had changed, he had extreme OCD and compulsively viewed pornography.

Dr Boros-Lavack’s assertion that it was Cauchi’s misogyny that lay behind the Westfield rampage rather than any psychosis drew gasps in the courtroom.

Counsel assisting the inquest Dr Peggy Dwyer SC challenged her, suggesting she held that view ‘because you don’t want to accept, yourself, the failings in your care of Joel’.

Despite offering her ‘sincere apologies’ and saying of the murders she was ‘sharing the pain, it has devastated me personally’, Dr Boros-Lavack replied: ‘I did not fail in my care of Joel and I refuse – I have no error on my behalf.’ 

However, in the witness box the following day, Dr Boros-Lavack withdrew the misogyny diagnosis as speculation rather than a clinical assessment. 

‘It was conjecture on my part and I shouldn’t have speculated four years later after I completed his treatment,’ she told the court.

Dwyer, who described Dr Boros-Lavack as ‘the treating psychiatrist, who weaned Mr Cauchi off his medication’ asked the opinion of another medical witness.

Dr Dwyer put it to a registered nurse referred to as RN3, who had also attended to Cauchi: ‘Is it your view that if Joel had remained medicated and mentally well, he would not have been capable of committing this terrible travesty?’

‘I think so,’ the nurse replied. ‘Yes.’

Asked if more follow-up should have been done on his condition after moving on from clinical care, RN3 said ‘It’s very, very hard.

‘People do get lost (in) follow up. With hindsight, things could have been done differently, with reflection.’ 

Michele and Andrew Cauchi are pictured above in their Toowoomba garden two days after the tragedy. Mrs Cauchi raised the alarm seven times with Dr Boros-Lavack’s clinic after Joel was taken off his medication, but her concerns were ignored 

Joel Cauchi (above after being shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott) was ‘floridly psychotic’ when he carried out the Westfield massacre armed with a Ka-Bar military knife. Experts have said the rampage could have been prevented had he not been taken off antipsychotic medication 

Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack (left) and her husband, businessman Richard Lavack (right) 

Dr Boros-Lavack is promoted on health websites as having ‘a special interest in the treatment of schizophrenia’ and being ‘well-versed in various therapeutic approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and supportive psychotherapy’.

Criminal psychologist Dr Tim Watson-Munro told the Mail that these were mostly ‘chat therapies’ for people with personality disorders or anxiety.

The inquest heard that Dr Boros-Lavack treated Cauchi from 2012 to 2020.

For 15 years, Cauchi took Clopazine, considered the psychotropic drug of last resort to control severe ‘treatment-resistant’ form of schizophrenia. 

Cauchi’s father Andrew also had the illness, the doctor told the inquest, and the condition was likely hereditary.

In 2019 Dr Boros-Lavack let him come off Clozapine after Cauchi expressed a strong desire to do so to alleviate the resulting lack of joy or motivation, and a blunting effect.

Since the Toowoomba Clinic went into financial administration, Dr Boros-Lavack and her MBA graduate husband have operated the Mi-Mind Centre (above) in Toowoomba, Queensland largest regional town

Joel Cauchi in Westfield, moments before he is shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott

Now operating the Mi-Mind psychiatric clinic in Toowoomba, Dr Boros-Lavack capitulated at the inquest on her original testimony that Joel Cauchi wasn’t psychotic when he entered Bondi Junction Westfield in April 2024

He also wanted to enjoy a sex life with women, and side effects of his medication included sexual dysfunction and deterioration of libido.

Dr Boros-Lavack rediagnosed Cauchi with ‘first episode’ schizophrenia, deeming it safe for him to cease taking Clozapine. 

When Mrs Cauchi raised the alarm on the return of her son’s schizophrenic symptoms, such as hearing voices, Dr Boros-Lavack prescribed another drug, Abilify, which he did not take.

Andrew Cauchi would later take away his son’s collection of knives, including the Ka-Bar style of military weapons with which Joel killed, only to have a deluded Joel report his dad to police for ‘theft’.

At the inquest, Dr Boros-Lavack acknowledged Mrs Cauchi’s concern for her son but it did not come from any position of medical expertise, describing her as ‘a beautiful, beautiful mother but she is not a psychiatrist’.

Since the financial collapse of their Toowoomba Clinic, Dr Boros-Lavack and her husband have continued to run a medical practice, the Mi-Mind Centre in South Toowoomba.

The couple, who live in a $1.3m house at Preston, between Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, previously worked in New Zealand although Andrea is originally from Hungary.

Joel Cauchi on QPS bodycam explaining to police his knife collection after the clearly deluded schizophrenia sufferer reported his own father, Andrew, for confiscating his knife collection

Inspector Amy Scott (pictured second left alongside NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb) salutes a memorial to the dead in the Bondi Junction Westfield massacre, one year on from the tragedy in which Scott played a vital role

Mr Lavack was a flight systems centre manager at the Massey University School of Aviation on New Zealand’s North Island and CEO of Squish Drinks, which pioneered a hisbiscus-based fruit drink.

In 2020, after fundraising ‘many millions’ the Lavacks opened the $9million Toowoomba Clinic offering ‘top service, luxury beds, facility already planning to expand in early 2021’.

Local media quoted the psyhciatrist as saying, that ‘the first patient discharged from the Toowoomba Clinic walked out the doors in October 2020 with tears in her eyes. 

‘When we asked, “Is something wrong?” she replied “I’m just so sad to be leaving”.’

The clinic offered a ‘holistic approach’ with psychiatry ‘and a full array of treatments’, with plans for an ‘an exercise physiologist, massage therapist, an onsite gym, a qualified diversionary therapist with an art room and a consulting dietitian’.

But by May 2024, the centre financially collapsed and local media reported that ‘patients were left in limbo’.

Bodycam footage of Joel Cauchi when he was questioned by police in 2021 after being pulled over for driving erratically through Brisbane in 2021, about two years after ceasing his medication

Computer created  image of the final minutes of  the Westfield rampage, when Inspector Amy Scott aims at a knife-wielding Joel Cauchi running towards her 

On May 3 a public notice was issued that the company had entered an external voluntary administration. 

That collapse came years after Dr Boros-Lavack was named in the findings of a 2017 inquest held in Hobart into the death of a seven-week old baby. 

The baby died on November 28, 2012 – five days after Dr Boros-Lavack had assessed the baby’s mother as competent to make medical decisions for the child.

The baby boy died from severe head trauma, a post mortem detecting a severe brain injury, fractured skull, multiple rib fractures, and fractures to both femurs and his right pelvis.

The findings note that the child’s mother didn’t protect the boy as she should have done, but that she was subject to the violence and control of her partner.

‘Child Protection Services did not protect (the boy) as it had a duty to do. If it had undertaken its duty under the Act in accordance with correct practice and procedure, (his) death would not have occurred,’ the Coroner concluded. 

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