Queensland police said they were considering murder charges against a Cairns mother as relatives struggled to fathom how a woman who was a maternal figure to extended family and friends could be accused of killing seven of her own children, as well as a niece, in Australia’s worst ever such case.
The arrested woman, aged 37, remained under police guard in hospital on Saturday after the stabbing deaths of the eight children at her house in the north Queensland city’s suburb of Manoora a day earlier.
The victims were formally identified as the woman’s daughters aged 12, 11 and two years, her sons aged nine, eight, six and five, and her niece aged 14.
In all five fathers who had children with the woman have been bereaved, as have another couple from Cairns’s interwoven Indigenous community.
Detective Inspector Bruno Asnicar told reporters the arrested woman was “currently assisting us with our enquiries” while all other parents had been spoken to by police.
“I don’t think anybody would imagine any reaction other than absolute devastation to be told your child’s dead and of course that was the case,” he said.
“Even under these horrific circumstances and the trauma they’ve been through, the support that the family has been giving us in this investigation has been outstanding.
“It’s been because of them that this process has been able to be done in a really calm, easy and the least intrusive way possible.”
Asnicar said charges against the arrested woman “will be considered of course – investigations are obviously continuing in that direction”.
“We’ll do that when it’s appropriate and everything’s been completed,” he said, adding that the woman would remain under police guard.
For those hit hardest by one of Australia’s worst mass killings – the circumstances of which remained unclear – the case was impossible to fathom.
A cousin of the woman, who asked to be identified simply as Mr Stephen, told Guardian Australia that she was known locally as Big Mama – a figure of warmth who welcomed children from around the neighbourhood into her home and fed them.
“She’s a relative, she’s blood, she’s an aunty, in the community kids know her,” he said. “I still have love for her.”
The grief-stricken father of the niece who was killed told the Australian Associated Press he was bewildered, having “lost a beautiful daughter … what for? What has she done?”
Mr Stephen, who grew up living near the accused woman, said the devastating incident took place a day after he had brought his own family to Cairns from Brisbane for the Christmas holidays.
“It affects the family – myself as well because I have kids and they’re my nieces and nephews so it’s a big shock,” he said.
“It should be happy times but it’s a tragedy – it’s sort of like a big step back.”
Relatives of the children were travelling to Cairns from Brisbane, Rockhampton and the Torres Strait Islands to join the grieving. “All of the other families are still at home processing. That’s all you can do,” Mr Stephen said.
Asnicar said the results of autopsies would be available in several days as forensic experts continued to gather evidence at the Murray Street crime scene.
Queensland’s acting premier, Tim Nicholls, and the acting police commissioner, Brett Pointing, joined a vast number of people from the community throughout Cairns who paid respects at an impromptu shrine of flowers and soft toys outside the crime scene.
The Cairns mayor, Bob Manning, who has been contacted by people from the Torres Strait to South America and Europe in regards to the case, said the much of the city was numbed by the tragedy.
“We’ve got eight kids here – to think of the denial of their lives is beyond comprehension,” he told Guardian Australia.
Manning said he was born and raised in Manoora and that Murray Street where the killings took place was “where some of my best mates lived”.
“It’s a great little area, always has been. They’re a great community out there, the Torres Strait people, with their sense of community and family,” he said.
Manning and other senior government officials and police had been in consultation with local elders about Indigenous community protocols around mourning, which include avoidance of publishing names or images of the dead. Community advocate Yodie Batzke called on younger people to resist the urge to break those protocols through social media.
