Behind every statistic there is someone like Jenny or Gretl. Their friends and family say things must change
Police were almost at Jennifer Petelczyc’s home in Perth’s wealthy western suburbs when the final gunshot rang out.
By the time they made it inside the Floreat house, they found Mark Bombara had already shot two people and then taken his own life.
The 63-year-old property developer had arrived at the Berkeley Crescent home armed with a Glock handgun looking for his estranged wife, Rowena.
But the mother of their four children was not there. So, instead, he murdered her best friend, Jennifer, 59, and her 18-year-old daughter, Gretl. Petelczyz’s 23-year-old daughter, Liesl, is now the sole surviving member of her immediate family, after losing her father to pancreatic cancer five years ago.
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Police will hold an internal investigation examining how they responded to chilling warnings about the killer in the lead up to the murders. Bombara’s daughter Ariel says authorities failed to listen to repeated pleas for help.
This week, a stoic Ariel sat before television cameras and said she and her mother fled the family’s $3.1m Mosman Park home on 28 March. She said they told police on three occasions between 30 March and 2 April that they were afraid of their violent father and husband – and that he had access to guns.
Ariel Bombara says she told police that a Glock pistol was missing from his 13-gun stash.
“We were ignored by five different male officers across three occasions of reporting,” Ariel claimed. “I want answers.”
Thresholds for restraining orders too high
In the past five months, 31 women have been killed across Australia. In Western Australia, officers respond to one family and domestic violence incident every 20 minutes, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
In early May – a month after Ariel says police refused to issue a restraining order against her father – the federal government labelled violence against women “a national crisis” and pledged almost $1bn to help them leave abusive relationships.
At the time, the WA premier, Roger Cook, said that no other state was “working as hard … to reduce incidents of family and domestic violence”.
Now he says the state must do better – as a society.
Hours after Ariel’s revelations on Tuesday, a Covid-riddled and red-eyed police commissioner, Col Blanch, fronted reporters.
He announced an internal investigation and defended his officers. He insisted they had followed policy, written incident reports, held the necessary meetings and made referrals to appropriate agencies.
“[Ariel’s] experience is what matters to me,” Blanch said. “Victim-survivors, particularly of domestic violence – their experience with police is what matters to us. We have to do better if that is their experience. All I’m saying is, we did act.”
The WA police minister, Paul Papalia, has pointed to outdated state gun laws and suggested the “thresholds” that allow police to issue a temporary, three-day protective police restraining order are too high.
Papalia says the police did not have any “formal records” of a complaint about a family violent act by Bombara before the shooting.
Bombara’s murder weapon was licensed as one of two collectors’ firearms. He also had 11 recreational licences.
But WA’s Restraining Orders Act is broad in its definition and states that officers may implement a restraining order if they reasonably believe a person has committed family violence.
The current firearms act allows police officers to seize guns if “possession… may result in harm being suffered by any person”.
In WA’s upper house, and before this tragedy, parliamentarians were already debating updates to gun laws penned in the 1970s to remove recreational licences and make collector guns harder to obtain, Papalia says.
He says there are currently 1,000 serious offenders with firearm licences – 100 of these have been charged with family domestic violence offences.
Greens MLC Brad Pettitt says he got to know Mark Bombara during his time as Fremantle mayor, but last spoke to him in 2018. Bombara had been a major property developer, buying and selling tens of millions of dollars’ worth of properties across the state.
“This was a guy that came across as a nice, friendly, jovial businessman and so coming back to the gun laws, you need a mechanism to be able to get the guns back off people,” Pettitt said. Such an amendment would require sending the current firearm reform bill back down to the lower house.
Calls for protection going unheeded
While gun legislation is fundamental, it’s also vital that women are listened to when they report they are at risk, according to University of Western Australia criminal lawyer Stella Tarrant.
“Research shows that women who are killed, prior to being killed, regularly know that they are in lethal danger,” Tarrant said.
“People need to listen to women saying they are in danger. In this context, that need to listen to those women who were saying they were in danger was amplified by the presence of not just a gun, but a cache of guns.”
CJH Legal’s Cally Hannah, a Perth-based restraining order lawyer, said she fields multiple phone calls from clients weekly saying: “I don’t know what to do, I’ve reported this to police, and they are not helping me.”
Hannah says she contacts police stations personally to urge them to take action to protect the women involved. “The women’s reports tend to be dismissed [by police] in a belittling manner and that compounds their distress,” Hannah said.
Floreat is part of Perth’s golden triangle, a leafy established collection of affluent suburbs west of the central business district known for its riverfront mansions, private schools and proximity to the beach.
Maddie Hillbeck went to St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls with Gretl and said her friend had an unmatched commitment to water polo.
“They were so generous and always had open arms to everyone. Gretl always supported me in everything that I did, and she stuck up for me like no one else. She was such a beautiful person and I am so grateful for the time we had together, and the memories we made,” Hillbeck said.
Hillbeck says that this tragedy is a sign that something needs to happen to stop the increase in women losing their lives to violence.
“We have to remember that for every statistic there is, behind it is someone like Jenny or Gretl.”
“This is a time where we all need to come together and make the change that Jenny and Gretl would have wanted to see.”
