Bondi stabbings: ‘We are so sorry for what our son has done’, say Joel Cauchi’s parents

It was a moment of awful candour when the father of Sydney mass murder Joel Cauchi talked of ‘loving a monster’.

Joel Cauchi’s distraught father, Andrew, spoke to the media at the family’s home in Toowoomba on Monday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tertius Pickard

It was a moment of awful candour when the father of Sydney mass murderer Joel Cauchi talked of ­“loving a monster”.

Just days after recognising their son in the footage of stabbings at Bondi Junction as they watched television on Saturday night, Andrew and Michele Cauchi did a rare thing and fronted the media to offer a parental insight into a killer who quietly struggled in life before erupting in a knife-wielding rampage, slaughtering six people before being shot dead.

The elderly couple, both in their 70s, look exhausted and grief-stricken, with the pain of what their son had done etched all over their faces.

Harrowed by a media pack camped outside their modest Toowoomba cottage since their son was named on Sunday as being ­responsible for Australia’s latest mass murder, they had defensively refused repeated requests for interviews.

But midmorning on Monday, as the camera shutters clicked away while they wandered around their backyard, Ms Cauchi was the first to break her silence … and 20 years of worry, and unconditional love for a son, who was cursed with schizophrenia since his teenage years, poured out.

Ms Cauchi, a devout Christian who has long worked at soup kitchens feeding the homeless, began by expressing her hope that the media was not “harassing” the victims’ families in the same way before she then clasped her arms and apologised for her son’s actions.

“Really, I am so sorry about what my son has done,” she said.

“We don’t know why he did what he did. He was brought up in love, he was a loved child, he was under the care of his doctors for 18 years.”

Ms Cauchi then spoke of how her son – who lived with the couple until five years ago and had completed a university degree – tired of “taking meds” and wanted to live his life.

“Anyone who has a relative with mental illness will understand medication does not make you feel very well,” she said before confirming that he had been taken off drugs under the supervision of a doctor.

Both parents spoke of the universal torment of not knowing where their son was, whether he was living rough and of the helplessness as his mental health spiralled after he left home.

Ms Cauchi said anyone with a family member or friend suffering mental illness should contact Arafmi, a support service that her husband said she worked at as a volunteer.

It was a heartfelt appeal from a mother who had long fought for her son against an illness that, in the end, hurt so many.

For his father, also a devout Christian, schizophrenia had robbed his “highly intelligent” son – who is also described as a “lovely, quiet boy” – at a chance at life.

Mr Cauchi broke down several times as he spoke of his love for his son and the struggle his son had endured for his entire adult life.

He later said he wanted to talk to the media so that people understood his son and that it was the illness that was responsible for the terrible events in Sydney.

“He is my son, and I am loving a monster. To you he is a monster – to me he was a very sick boy,” Mr Cauchi said.