Call for law change after mentally ill woman stole gun club’s pistol to kill father

It’s been 13 years since Di Bonarius’s sister shot their beloved father dead after stealing a gun from a pistol club, but the traumatic aftershocks of the violence are still shaking her family.

Di Bonarius with a picture of her father Lalin Fernando, who was shot dead by her mentally ill sister in 2010. Picture: John Feder

It’s been 13 years since Di Bonarius’s sister shot their beloved father dead, but the traumatic aftershocks of the violence are still shaking her family.

Mrs Bonarius’s sister was 43 in July 2010 when she became a probationary member of the Sydney Pistol Club, crossing “no” on a form that asked her to declare if she “had any mental illness or other disorders that may prevent you from using a firearm safely”.

The woman - who The Australian is not naming online at the request of her family - did not reveal she had long suffered from paranoid psychosis, unstable schizophrenia and major depression, plagued by delusions of a global conspiracy against her, which she falsely believed was engineered by her father.

On August 22, 2010, she stole a 0.22-calibre Ruger semiautomatic pistol from the Sydney Pistol Club; slipping it into her handbag after telling staff she wanted to shoot in the match of the day.

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She rang her 70-year-old father, Lalin Fernando, asked him to come to her home in Glebe, in Sydney’s inner west, to help load software on to her computer, and then shot him repeatedly in the head.

Lalin Fernando Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Mrs Bonarius’s sister was found not guilty of murder in 2011, after a judge accepted her mental illness defence.

More than a decade after her sister killed their father, Di Bonarius told The Australian that his death, and the violence that caused it, still deeply traumatised her family.

“This one act caused such a ripple in the lake that is my family that it continues to this day, and will until I die,” said mother-of-five Mrs Bonarius.

“I would not wish the last 13 years of my life on my worst enemy … what we experienced was the equivalent of an emotional tsunami or nuclear bomb. It hurt every member associated with my family, including my best friend, who my father called his fourth daughter.”

In the wake of her father’s killing, Mrs Bonarius and her family unsuccessfully campaigned for the NSW government to remove section 6B of the Firearms Act, which allows people to use a firearm at a shooting range without a licence.

In 2012, they delivered a petition to then NSW police minister Michael Gallacher, with 13,000 signatures calling for the scrapping of section 6B.

Mrs Bonarius said she could not understand why the state government had not acted in 13 years to make the “sensible” reform decision, which would reverse a 2008 legislative amendment introduced by the Shooters and Fishers Party.

She said if the government would not remove section 6B, it should at least conduct a proper background check on unlicensed people who applied to shoot at ranges.

“We don’t want to stop anybody using their gun,” Mrs Bonarius said.

“All we want to do is make sure that people who shouldn’t have the ability to hold a gun, and use it in a manner that’s unsafe to them or someone else, those people be stopped.

“And the thing that shocks me is that I don’t understand why I have to fight so hard for something that seems to make all the sense in the world.”

But a spokeswoman for NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley said there were “no immediate plans for legislative change right now”.

Anyone impacted by a homicide can contact the Queensland Homicide Victims Support Group on 1800 774 744.