By Cam Lucadou-Wells
An ice-fuelled driver’s five-hour rampage across the South East including a carjacking, a police-car ramming and a high-speed crash with a 4WD has been described by a judge as “frankly horrifying”.
Jamie Barlow, 36, pleaded guilty in the Victorian County Court to aggravated carjacking, two counts of conduct endangering life as well as running red lights and driving on the wrong side of the road.
In the mid-afternoon of 11 December 2018, the unlicensed and speeding Barlow erratically wove between traffic before striking a LandCruiser from behind on Eastlink in Dandenong.
The victim’s 4WD stuck a roadside barrier, flipping and rolling three times.
Without stopping to check on the driver, Barlow fled 300 metres from the scene in his damaged car.
On Greens Road, he jumped into the front passenger seat of a van stopped in traffic. He offered the driver $500 to drive him onto the tollway, but the driver refused and pulled over.
Soon after, Barlow ran into a business and stole a van.
During a struggle with the van’s owner, Barlow reversed the van causing the owner to fall out. The victim’s head struck the ground, rendering him unconscious.
Without concern for the owner’s welfare, Barlow drove away.
At 6pm, Barlow drove the van over a nature strip and narrowly avoided crashing through a home’s front door in Seaford.
He continued driving recklessly on the wrong side of the road, running a red light as well as entering the wrong side of a roundabout.
About 7.30pm, police tried to intercept on Frankston-Dandenong Road but Barlow accelerated away. Soon after, police deployed stop-sticks, which punctured the van’s two front tyres.
Barlow continued driving on the van’s front rims through several red lights, narrowly missing other drivers.
As police followed, he turned onto Princes Highway and Lonsdale Street in Dandenong and rammed in the back of a car stopped at a red light at Clow Street.
He then drove into a police car that blocked his way. Police with batons and dogs swarmed the van. Barlow refused to get out until police broke in with batons and sprayed him with OC spray.
In sentencing on 24 April, Judge Felicity Hampel said that Barlow had not only been meth-affected, but had told police he topped up during the “protracted” course of events.
He tested negative to an alcohol-blood test and refused an oral-fluid drug test. He was deemed unfit for interview at the time due to his state.
Meanwhile, the LandCruiser and the stolen van were both written off, their owners were fortunate to escape serious injury, Judge Hampel noted.
At the time, Barlow was serving a community corrections order following a jail term for dangerous driving whilst pursued by police in 2017.
His “significant” criminal history spanned from 2002, including driving, violence, firearms, property damage, dishonesty, drugs and bail offences.
No type of sentence including a good-behaviour bond, community orders, suspended sentence, jail or parole had deterred him from re-offending, Judge Hampel said.
In mitigation, she noted Barlow’s significant childhood disadvantage.
At the time of offending, he told of believing that a cult wanted to hang him and that a taskforce was after him. He’d fled from the first crash due to being in fear of his life, he recalled.
It was unclear whether at the time, Barlow was in a drug-induced psychosis or whether his diagnosed schizophrenia relapsed due to ice use, Judge Hampel said.
Whatever the case, his culpability was not substantially reduced by his mental impairment.
Judge Hampel said Barlow was aware of the correlation of ice abuse and his psychoses. He had been medicated, and ordered to engage in drug rehab and mental health treatment as part of his CCO.
Barlow’s rehabilitation prospects were “guarded”. For the sake of community safety and managing his mental health and drug issues, he required a period of parole supervision, the judge said.
Barlow was jailed for up to six-and-a-half years, and eligible for parole after four. The term included 500 days in pre-sentence detention.
He was disqualified from driving for five years.
