New South Wales Police Commissioner Peter McKenna issued an urgent plea Monday for the state government to deploy every available domestic-violence resource after four related deaths in just over 24 hours, a cluster that advocates said exposes gaps between awareness campaigns and front-line protection.
The weekend timeline
On Saturday, police responded to three separate attacks in less than 12 hours. At a Bondi Beach unit, officers allege 47-year-old Sergei Mitnik fatally stabbed his 90-year-old grandmother; his lawyer told a court Mitnik’s mental state had been affected by the weight-loss drug Ozempic, a claim prosecutors have not endorsed. Hours later, investigators found a 70-year-old woman dead at Mole Creek in northern NSW; police sources said she appeared to have been decapitated, and her son was charged with murder.
In Wagga Wagga, a 23-year-old woman was fatally stabbed inside a home in a suburb south of the city. Then on Sunday afternoon, cyclists near Springwood in the Blue Mountains discovered a mother and three children inside a car with stab wounds. A five-year-old boy died; two siblings and their mother in her 40s were taken to Westmead’s children’s hospital in critical condition. Police expect to charge the mother with one count of murder and two of attempted murder.
What McKenna asked for
McKenna told reporters the deaths were not random street crime but a domestic-violence emergency that required immediate funding for specialist prosecutors, high-risk teams, and secure accommodation. Premier Chris Minns has expanded coercive-control laws and advertised new crisis beds, but McKenna said the weekend toll showed responders were still arriving too late to households already known to multiple agencies.
Domestic Violence NSW, representing more than 200 service organizations, called for federal co-investment at the scale of the crisis and an integrated response linking health, housing, child protection, and justice data. The peak body said siloed reporting allowed perpetrators to move between regions without triggering risk flags.
Weapons and warnings
Knives were used in each of the four fatalities, reviving debate over NSW’s edged-weapon laws and the slow rollout of electronic monitoring for high-risk offenders on bail. Police Minister Yasmin Catley said the government would consider McKenna’s requests at cabinet this week but did not commit to new spending figures.
What happens next
Coronial inquests will examine whether any victim had active apprehended-violence orders or contact with hospitals in the weeks before the attacks. Federal Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said Canberra was willing to discuss a joint funding package but emphasized states control policing budgets.
Until those reviews begin, the documented toll is four deaths in a single weekend plus three children fighting for life in Westmead — a sequence that turned a routine Monday press conference into a public demand for resources matched to a crisis police say is outpacing the system built to prevent it.
