On an October night in 2023, Jennifer Mui Len Chin stabbed a teenage boy in her home.
She maintained she did not know the 14-year-old she knifed in her Perth home was her daughter’s boyfriend.
Because her daughter, also aged 14, was not meant to have one.
Seconds of ‘panic’
The “whirlwind of panic” in a Parkwood house that left a teenage boy with stab wounds to the chest was the focus of Chin’s District Court trial, in which she was ultimately found guilty of causing bodily harm.
Mother guilty of stabbing teen daughter’s boyfriend
In a matter of seconds on one evening in suburban Perth, Chin literally uncovered the secret boyfriend, called on her six-year-old son to get a knife from the kitchen, chased the teen to the front door and plunged the blade into his chest not once, but twice.
She claimed the teen looked “cocky” as he stepped towards her, and she just wanted him to stay away.
Chin told the court she had armed herself with a knife after unexpectedly finding the half-dressed teenager under a doona in her husband’s bedroom
She needed to “protect my kids”, she told the jury.
The secret romance
Earlier in the evening, Chin’s daughter had snuck her boyfriend into the home and had sex with him in her father’s bedroom.
It was not the first time he had been over without her parents knowing.
The romance was clandestine because her parents did not want her to have a boyfriend at her age, and her Christian mother had firm beliefs.
Chin told the court she did not believe in sex before marriage. (ABC News: Dave Weber)
“I don’t believe in sex before marriage,” she’d told the court.
Nevertheless, Chin said her focus was on the youth as an “intruder” in her house, and she was panicked to find him there.
Chin soon had a knife in her hand, after enlisting her six-year-old son to get one from the kitchen.
Six-year-old’s evidence
The six-year-old’s police interview in 2023 was played to the court, and constituted some of the most poignant evidence the jury was to hear.
Wearing a dinosaur hat, the boy described how “my mum trapped him and stabbed him” and then “they ran away”, referring to his sister, who had joined her boyfriend in fleeing the house.
He said his mother had asked him to get the knife from the kitchen.
Chin’s six-year-old son told police he “gave mummy the knife”. (ABC News: Glyn Jones)
Asked what he did next, the boy said he “held it carefully” and “went to dad’s bedroom” and “gave mummy the knife”.
While he did not see the actual stabbing, he heard his mother say to the teen, “you have nowhere to go, now”.
Prosecutor Chadd Graham said it showed it was the mother who was the aggressor, and not the teen.
Home invader defence rejected
Mr Graham said the teen had said “sorry” more than 10 times after Chin discovered him, and was trying to escape when he went to the locked front door.
“She was angry at this boy,” Mr Graham said.
Chin had relied on the home invader defence, which allows residents to use force, on reasonable grounds, to get someone to leave the property or to stop them from committing an offence.
The teen was stabbed near the front door of the Parkwood home. (ABC News: Glyn Jones)
But Mr Graham said the use of violence by Chin was unlawful because she did not have objective, reasonable grounds to think the teen was a home invader, and the state did not accept she acted in self-defence.
Chin’s daughter, Mr Graham said, was not distressed about the “intruder” and her behaviour suggested he was “not a stranger to her”.
She even warned her mother she would be the one to go to jail, as she held the knife above her head.
The stabbing was “an intentional act to cause harm to him” and was unnecessary.
The jury agreed.
The case, which even the judge said was in a “pretty unusual category”, reaches the sentencing stage in the District Court on September 3.
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