Canadian prisoner attacked by convicted terrorist now in legal fight with Victorian government
With the prospect of parole still some years away, Kailee Mitz did her best to settle into life in an Australian prison and it was the last place she expected to be a victim of the crumbling Islamic State.
Key points:
- Kailee Mitz is suing the state for damages after being stabbed while imprisoned
- Mitz was attacked in 2020 by fellow inmate Momena Shoma with a concealed pair of gardening shears
- Shoma was already serving a 42-year sentence for a previous, terror-related stabbing
In October 2020, the Canadian was awaiting sentencing for her part in a plot to smuggle more than 15 kilograms of methamphetamines into Australia.
She was at Melbourne’s Dame Phyllis Frost Centre when she was ambushed by Momena Shoma — a convicted Islamic militant — who tried to kill her with a pair of gardening shears that had been secreted in her headscarf.
Up until that point, Shoma — who was already serving a 42-year sentence over a terror-related stabbing — appeared to show little interest in her victim.
However, in reality, she had been planning the attack for at least eight months when she was moved into a more-open wing of the prison, bringing her into Mitz’s orbit.
Mitz — who is from London, Ontario — had no sense that things were to take a dramatic and violent turn.
“We weren’t overly friendly with each other … but I was kind to her, when she got let out, I would say good morning and ask her how she’s doing,” she told the ABC through her lawyers.
As Mitz reclined on a couch with a novel about a fictitious call girl, Shoma calmly walked into the Canadian’s low-security unit, armed with gardening shears that another prisoner had hidden in the laundry.
It was hard for Mitz, 28, not to notice the shears immediately — they were about 30 centimetres long, with black and bright orange handles.
“I asked her what she was doing,” she recalled.
“Then she started swinging them around and then she raised them up … she was looking at me in my eyes … and she brought them down and tried to stab me.
Shoma ‘was smiling’ during frenzied attack
What happened next is still a blur to Mitz, who has three young children.
“At that very moment, I don’t know what I was thinking. All I knew was that I just had to get away from her and that place,” she said.
She threw up her arms and Shoma stabbed her in the hand before Mitz flipped herself over the back of the couch, and fell on the floor.
At the same time, another inmate seized Shoma from behind and pinned her arms, which allowed Mitz to race through the door and summon the guards.
Shoma was taken to a holding cell in another unit, but not before a terrified Mitz glimpsed her face.
“She was just looking at me and she was smiling,” she said.
Eyewitnesses later revealed that Shoma was seen happy and laughing in her cell after the attack.
Shoma, now 29, was remarkably frank and told investigators that she had been hoping to spark international headlines by attacking Mitz, who was a Canadian citizen.
She cheered when they charged her with terror offences, and told them that Allah would be pleased with her.
How Shoma came to arm herself with the gardening shears and stab her victim in a low-security unit is the crux of a new lawsuit launched in the County Court of Victoria by Mitz, who is suing the state for unspecified damages.
The Department of Justice is yet to file a defence.
In Mitz’s statement of claim, she alleges that prison officials breached their duty of care to her and were negligent because they failed to supervise Shoma, assess her risk to other prisoners, install cameras in the low-security unit, and stop the woman from accessing weapons.
She has also made sensational claims against senior prison staff at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, who she said tried to deter her from telling anyone about the attack, including family members and Canada’s High Commissioner to Australia.
When she ignored this advice, she alleges that senior prison officials began “interrogating” her.
“I felt very intimidated. I felt like, at that current moment, that I was in the wrong,” Mitz told the ABC through her lawyers.
“They just kept asking me why I called [the High Commissioner] and that’s when I brought up the fact that I felt that they were negligent, and that they should have monitored [Shoma] better.
“Their response to me was that we can’t just keep her in a cell and throw away the key, which is kind of contradictory because that is what they are doing to her now, and it’s unfortunate that it took her trying to kill me for that to happen.”
Victoria no stranger to high-profile prison attacks
This isn’t the first time that Victorian prisons have been thrust into the spotlight over vicious internal attacks, and the case also comes after the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) delivered a scathing report that painted a picture of a system in crisis.
In February, 2019, Melbourne drug kingpin Tony Mokbel — who is serving 30 years behind bars — was left close to death after an attack in the maximum-security Barwon Prison by Teira Bennett and Eldea Teuira, members of the notorious Pacific Islander prison gang G-fam, who attacked him with make-shift shivs.
Mokbel suffered stab wounds, a fractured skull, a brain haemorrhage and lost teeth in the brutal assault, which was sparked after a story in the Herald Sun newspaper called him a “feared prison big-wig”.
In April 2010, underworld figure Carl Williams — who was serving life in prison for four murders — was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike by Matthew Johnson, the leader of the Prisoners of War gang, for co-operating with police.
Mitz’s lawyer, Jeremy King from law firm Robinson Gill, said the Victorian prison system was under an “enormous amount of pressure”.
“We have very tight bail laws, which means that there are a lot of people on remand and a lot of people in prisons, but all that really means is then the State of Victoria and any private entity, really, has to make sure that the prisons are properly staffed with guards and that people are properly looked after,” he said.
However, Mr King said, Mitz’s case was particularly stunning.
“I have never seen a case in prison, where garden shears have effectively gone missing, and then been able to be used as a weapon,” Mr King said.
“To put it in context, in other prisons, you have extremely tight controls over every bit of equipment. So, for example, a broom has to be checked in and checked out. And, so, given that context, it’s absolutely staggering that garden shears could go missing and then be used as a weapon.
“When you are in prison, you obviously have no liberty, that’s the whole point … because of that, the law says because you have absolute control over the prisoners, you owe them an extremely strong and tight duty of care.
“We allege that they breached that duty of care.”
A drug-smuggling payday disguised as a holiday
Four days before she boarded a flight to Australia in February 2020, Kailee Mitz uploaded a new profile photo to Facebook.
It was candid, showing her being nuzzled by a man in a matching hoodie, and the caption read: “I’m so proud to be yours, I love you babes.”
In reality, Mitz already knew her trip would involve transporting drugs into the country.
Mitz met the man in the photo, Wayne Hackett, about a year before she landed in an Australian prison.
She said the new relationship was the healthiest she had ever been in, without a shred of pain or pressure that had become hallmarks of her romantic life.
And, with all the chaos that usually swirled around her, it was a welcome relief.
The start of 2020 was tough for Mitz, who was struggling to get by.
Her version of events is contained within court documents.
With $15,000 of debt and very little work coming her way as a cleaner, Mitz was sharing a bedroom with her three children in her mother’s basement apartment and living on about $16 a day.
Her new beau, Hackett, was also struggling to make ends meet and lived in a friend’s basement.
So, when he was approached to carry drugs to Australia, and Mitz was asked to come along to create the cover of a holiday, it seemed like the couple’s chance to lift themselves out of poverty.
They would’ve been paid $40,000 each, almost seven times what Mitz would make in a year.
The couple was told by the organiser of the trip, a man called Jazz, that the drugs they were ferrying Down Under were steroids — court documents show it was accepted that Mitz did not know what type of drugs she was carrying.
Jazz assured Mitz that the steroids would be secreted in Hackett’s suitcase because she was a single mother.
Cache of methamphetamines discovered in luggage
Before their flight, the couple gathered their things in garbage bags, which someone else then packed into their suitcases.
However, about two weeks before the trip, on Valentines Day 2020, and with her reservations growing, Mitz tried to pull out, only to be told that she would have to pay back $5,000, a sum that would take her about a year to earn.
So, on February 29, 2020 — just as the COVID-19 pandemic was finding its footing in the Western world — Mitz and Hackett boarded an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Australia, carrying two large, light blue suitcases.
It was only after they touched down at Melbourne International Airport — and Australian Border Force officers uncovered more than 15 kilograms of pure methamphetamine in the lining of their luggage, worth about $6.7 million on the street — that the reality of the risk she had taken set in.
“I just have a question, ’cause clearly that shit looks like drugs,” Mitz said to the officer.
“It is not mine, and I was just wondering, ’cause I know I’m going to have to deal with the consequences now because of this. Do I go back to Canada to do it?” she asked, referring to the prospect of prosecution.
Of course, the answer was “No”.
The couple never made it to their accommodation at the Radisson Hotel near Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens.
Jail sentence tempered after attack
In November 2021, more than a year after being attacked in prison, Mitz pleaded guilty and was jailed in the County Court of Victoria, her two-week “vacation” transforming into an eight-year incarceration.
She was told she could apply for parole in four years.
The length of her sentence was tempered by Judge Michael Bourke, who described the attack by Shoma as “breathtaking”.
“Whilst you have committed a very serious offence, you are a person without criminal history and were already vulnerable in the prison environment,” the judge said.
“Your isolation here is, in my view, seriously exacerbated by what happened and the inevitable loss of safe feeling that follows..
“It is very likely that you will remain in protection with the difficulties attached to that.
Judge Bourke did, however, note the seriousness of Mitz’s offence.
“Your role was critical to the criminal operation. For financial benefit, albeit in pressing circumstances, you decided to take the risk of what you confront now,” he noted.
Hackett was jailed for nine-and-a-half years.
Moved to a ‘safe’, open unit
In the days before her attempted murder, Kailee Mitz called her mother, Corrina Gillings, in London, Ontario, and told her that things were getting better.
An impending move back to a more open unit within the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre represented as much freedom as prison could offer, and Mitz told her lawyer she said as much over the phone.
“I … told her that I got this great opportunity to move into a unit, which is supposed to be for privilege, like good behaviour, because there’s no cameras, you don’t get locked in a cell at night time,” Mitz said.
So when her daughter was attacked on October 30, 2020, Corrina Gillings responded how mothers the world over would.
“I thought you said that this unit was safe,” Mitz recalls her saying afterwards.
“I said, ‘I thought it was’.”
Mitz feared Shoma would ‘finish off the job’
Shoma carried out her attack while she was serving 42 years behind bars over another terrifying assault on an Australian father in February 2018.
Eight days after arriving in Australia from Bangladesh on a student visa, Shoma knelt over Roger Singaravelu, who was napping with his five-year-old daughter, and used both hands to plunge a large kitchen knife into his neck while yelling, “Allahu akbar”.
Immediately afterwards, Shoma told nearby neighbours and first responders that she had stabbed the man, and was ordered to do so by the Islamic State.
Shoma was equally brazen in the moments after she tried to kill Mitz.
“The stupid girl, just, I don’t know what she does, she falls off the couch and runs away outside. Loser. Coward. Just stop so that I can kill you,” Shoma told investigators.
“If I get released, then I’ll do it again.”
After the attack, Mitz’s clothes were seized as evidence, and she was taken to hospital where she couldn’t stop weeping.
“I was terrified for myself and the other women that were in the unit with me and I just kept thinking and I just kept repeating, ‘She was trying to kill me’.”
And, to her anguish, the prison, which already felt small, began to feel suffocating.
Not long after, she chose to return to a more-restricted unit as she struggled with flashbacks and anxiety.
“I have nightmares where she kills the officers so she can come and get me to finish off the job,” Mitz said.
“I had to tell them, ‘I can’t live in this unit. It’s causing me to have more trauma, being in there’, because I couldn’t sit in the lounge room. I just stayed in my cell, locked myself in there all the time. I didn’t feel safe.
‘You’re entitled to be looked after’
Her lawyer, Mr King, said it was a “degrading” way to treat a prisoner, and said Shoma was known to prison officials as a “violent offender”.
“That’s why she’d been placed in a high-risk unit. It’s important to note that Kailee was in a low-risk unit but, for reasons unknown to us at this stage, those units were able to mix very freely and it doesn’t appear to us that the supervision of Momena was appropriate,” Mr King said.
“When you’re a prisoner, you’re still entitled to be safe, you’re still entitled to be looked after and this is a case where the state of Victoria [has] really failed to look after Kailee and that she suffered pretty awful injuries as a result.”
Late last year, Shoma pleaded guilty to engaging in a terrorist attack and was sentenced to another six years, meaning that she could be behind bars until 2066.
She will be 72 if she completes her whole sentence.
Mitz is hoping that the lawsuit will lead to an apology and a payout, which could mean a new life for her and her children once she finishes her sentence and is deported.
When she returns to Canada, she wants to go back to school and become a nurse.
“Even though people who are in prison have done something wrong, it doesn’t make them a bad person,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice declined to comment as the matter is before the courts.
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