Legally insane: 3 takeaways from court judgment on school stabbing

On Oct 14 last year, the nation was shocked by news of the brutal killing of 16-year-old Yap Shing Xuen in her own school in Bandar Utama, by a schoolmate she had never spoken with.

Last Monday, the Shah Alam High Court acquitted the assailant of his murder charge, saying he could not be held criminally responsible because he was of unsound mind when he committed the killing.

Judge Adlin Abdul Majid ordered the boy, who was 14 at the time of the incident, to be institutionalised indefinitely at Hospital Bahagia Ulu Kinta, at the pleasure of the Selangor sultan. The prosecution is appealing against the verdict.

In the meantime, there are three things to know about the ruling, along with a copy of the written judgment issued on Wednesday.

1. LCH's rare and severe mental state

Psychiatric evaluation of the assailant – identified only as “LCH” due to restrictions under the Child Act 2001 – entailed three months of continuous monitoring and over 34 interviews, led by the court-appointed forensic psychiatrist Dr Ian Lloyd Anthony.

Ian's 27-page report also drew on interviews with LCH’s family, school and clinical records, and his journal and other forensic evidence.

Based on Ian's testimony, the court concluded that LCH was suffering from “very early-onset schizophrenia” from the age of nine. It went untreated and undiagnosed for five years.

The early onset is crucial, Ian testified, because this rare form of schizophrenia occurs in a brain that is still maturing; it severely impairs the ability to think.

People with adult-onset schizophrenia have a fully formed brain and stand a better chance of resisting the pressures of their hallucinatory and delusional symptoms, he said.

The five-year delay before LCH's condition was recognised as an illness and treated made matters worse.

Ian testified that the untreated psychosis grows more elaborate, more internally logical, and more resistant to treatment over time.

“As such, by the time of the incident, the child’s reality testing was impaired to the point that the world he perceived was not the world the rest of us live in.

“Compounding this, those five years fell within the most critical period of his brain development, a period he spent building an isolated, alternate world of his own rather than developing normally,” the judge wrote.

LCH’s illness manifested in many ways: severe anxiety about his appearance, social withdrawal, paranoia about being constantly watched and persecuted, an obsession with mass killers, and auditory hallucinations including supposed commands from Dylan Klebold, perpetrator of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.

The court set out how the illness came to focus on Yap. Around August 2024, LCH developed an infatuation with Yap and began following her at school and online. The court noted that the two had never spoken or interacted in real life before the killing. Yet LCH was convinced she reciprocated his feelings and was in love with him.

LCH’s feelings gradually shifted to envy, anger, and an intention to kill her, particularly after watching a video about the Japanese murderer Tatsuya Ichihashi, who had killed a British teacher.

He initially planned to kill Yap on April 20, 2027, to coincide with the Columbine anniversary.

After a one-week suspension for assaulting two classmates, he feared expulsion before he could carry out his plan, and brought it forward to Oct 14, 2025.

2. Premeditated murder or proof of delusion?

To successfully plead legal insanity, the defence needs more than a diagnosis that the accused was mentally unwell. It must also prove, on the balance of probabilities, that he was incapable of knowing his actions were legally or morally wrong.

The prosecution's key argument was that LCH's year-long tracking of Yap, and months spent procuring knives and replica clothing modelled on the Columbine shooters', showed he could organise, weigh risk and adjust plans.

They also argued he knew his actions were wrong because he hid knives under his school uniform for about two weeks.

Adlin rejected these arguments and accepted Ian's assessment. She ruled that the ability to make and carry out a plan does not, by itself, show that a person knows the plan is wrong.

She agreed with Ian that the plan to kill a girl he had never spoken to, while modelling himself on the Columbine shooters, was driven by his “delusional system”.

“None of this is the conduct of a rational, self-interested actor. Rather, it is the enactment, with meticulous but psychotically directed attention to a fictional script, of a delusional identification that had by then consumed the entirety of the child’s inner life,” the judge wrote.

A sign of LCH's state of mind during the killing came from the boy's medical history.

He has a history of fainting episodes at the sight of his own blood, even from minor cuts or medical procedures, going back as far as 2017. And yet, he inflicted between 180 and 200 stab wounds on Yap, and witnesses reported LCH appearing calm while covered in blood after carrying out the act.

“In my view, the absence of any fainting episode during the incident, in which he was in prolonged and close proximity to a very substantial quantity of blood, independently corroborates his dissociation during the incident,” the judge wrote.

The court also accepted Ian's testimony that a rational criminal aware of his guilt would have planned a method of minimising risk and avoiding capture after the act. LCH's actions had none of these hallmarks.

The court considered whether LCH could have faked his illness, and concluded it was real. It based this on an assessment of his journal, which began six months before the incident, and Ian's view that the complexity of the evidence and LCH's delusional system made it almost impossible to feign.

3. Treatment helps, but came too late

The court also pointed to Ian's testimony that LCH's condition markedly improved after he was prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

“(Ian) testified that within three weeks of starting medication, the hallucinations ceased and the delusions began to dissolve, and the child began engaging warmly with his family in a manner not seen for years,” the judge wrote.

The judge said the rapid change was consistent only with a genuine, treatment-responsive psychotic illness.

That recovery is welcome for LCH's well-being, but it came only after years of missed warning signs and a tragic death.

The court noted that the signs were, understandably, read as behavioural or disciplinary problems rather than as a medical emergency.

“Two families now have to bear the cost of that misreading,” the judge wrote.

A school counsellor referred him for private therapy after complaints about his lateness, sleeping in class and long hair. He was also angry at being forced to attend.

“The child attended four sessions, none of which was productive, as he remained guarded, uninterested and suspicious throughout, and would hide his face inside his T-shirt or behind his palms,” the court noted.

The judge closed her written judgment by stating that finding LCH's mind unsound when he killed Yap does not diminish the tragedy of Yap's death. But the case, she wrote, also showed how far a serious mental illness can progress in a child while remaining invisible to those around him.

If any good could come from the tragedy, she said, it would be that parents, schools, the courts and the public better understand the signs of untreated mental illness in children, “so that other families may be spared what both these families have suffered”.

Teen in school stabbing case showed signs of mental condition during Covid, court hears

Teen apologises over fatal school stabbing in unsworn statement from dock

School stabbing: Court orders teen to defend himself against murder charge

SNAPSHOT | Malacca school sees latest knife scare; PAS No 2 accuses Harapan of fear politics

School stabbing: Suhakam warns against spreading images, videos and personal info