The psychiatrist who took Bondi Junction killer Joel Cauchi off his antipsychotic medication and failed to listen to his mother’s repeated concerns about his declining mental state has been unmasked.
Queensland psychiatrist Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack can finally be identified as the specialist who treated Cauchi from 2012 to 2020 and weaned him off the powerful medication Clozapine – considered the psychotropic drug of last resort to control severe ‘treatment-resistant’ schizophrenia.
His mother, Michele Cauchi, contacted Dr Boros-Lavack’s private practice – called the Toowoomba Clinic – seven times in late 2019 and early 2020 to report that her son’s schizophrenic symptoms were returning after he was weaned off Clozapine.
His symptoms included hearing voices, leaving notes around the family home saying he was under the control of Satan or demons, his gait changing, extreme OCD and compulsively viewing pornography. However Mrs Cauchi’s fears were dismissed.
Cauchi was still off his medication when he went into a ‘florid psychotic state’ and killed six people in his bloody rampage through the Westfield Shopping Centre in April 2024.
Dr Boros-Lavack’s treatment has come under fire after the details were revealed at the inquest into the massacre, but until now her identity was kept secret by a legal gag.
Now Daily Mail Australia can identify her, and also reveal that her treatment was questioned at another inquest into the death of a 45-day-old baby.
Dr Boros-Lavack is a medical entrepreneur who – along with her former juice salesman husband Richard Lavack – opened the Toowoomba Clinic – a ‘luxury’ psychiatric pratice in Queensland which went belly up within four years. It was here that she treated Cauchi.
Joel Cauchi’s psychiatrist has finally been unmasked as Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack (above). Dr Boros-Lavack took Cauchi off his anti-psychotic medication because he didn’t like the side effects despite the drugs successfully controlling his schizophrenia for years
Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack took Joel Cauchi off the last-resort anti-psychotic drug Clozapine despite the mentally ill man’s severe ‘treatment-resistant’ form of the condition. At first, the psychiatrist refused to concede that Cauchi’s psychosis was the reason for his deadly rampage at the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre
This was just three years after a Tasmanian Coroner’s inquest found that Dr Boros-Lavack had given professional advice that an infant was safe to be in his mother’s care. Five days later the child was dead from inflicted brain injuries.
Dr Boros-Lavack now runs a psychiatric clinic called the Mi-Mind Centre in South Toowoomba with her husband.
On Thursday afternoon, the NSW Coroner’s Court released the names of Dr Boros-Lavack and her colleagues who had treated Cauchi and testified at the inquest into Bondi Junction Westfield massacre.
The inquest is investigating what led up to the deaths of Dawn Singleton, 25, Jade Young, 47, Yixuan Cheng, 27, Ashlee Good, 38, Pakria Darchia, 55, and Faraz Tahir, 30, and that of Cauchi.
In under three minutes on the afternoon of April 13 2024, Cauchi, 40, used a Ka-Bar military knife to murder the five shoppers and one security guard, and injure ten others.
Cauchi was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, and took Clozapine for 15 years. The medication successfully controlled his symptoms.
Cauchi’s father Andrew also had the illness, the doctor told the inquest, and the condition was likely hereditary.
In 2019 Dr Boros-Lavack weaned Cauchi off Clozapine after he expressed a dislike of its side effects with included lack of motivation and a ‘blunting’ effect on his moods.
Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack (above) is a medical entrepreneur who with her former juice salesman husband opened a ‘luxury’ psychiatric clinic in Queensland which went belly up within four years
The six victims of Joel Cauchi’s psychosis-driven murderous rampage, clockwise from top left, Ashlee Good, Faraz Tahir, Dawn Singleton, Pakria Darchia and Yixuan Cheng
Dr Boros-Lavack and her husband’s $9million luxury psychiatric centre called the Toowoomba Clinic (above) collapsed just 20 days after Joel Cauchi’s deadly rampage. The couple now run a new psychiatric clinic called the Mi-Mind Centre in South Toowoomba
He also wanted to enjoy a sex life with women, and side effects of his medication included sexual dysfunction and deterioration of libido.
Dr Boros-Lavack rediagnosed Cauchi with ‘first episode’ schizophrenia, deeming it safe for him to cease taking Clozapine.
When Mrs Cauchi raised the alarm on the return of her son’s schizophrenic symptoms, Dr Boros-Lavack prescribed another antipsychotic drug, Abilify, which he did not take.
At the inquest, Dr Boros-Lavack acknowledged Mrs Cauchi’s concern for her son but it did not come from any position of medical expertise, describing her as ‘a beautiful, beautiful mother but she is not a psychiatrist’.
Dr Boros-Lavack initially told the inquest that Cauchi was not psychotic. Instead, she said that stabbing to death six people was ‘likely due to his sexual frustrations and hatred towards women’.
Dr Boros-Lavack’s assertion at the inquest that it was Cauchi’s misogyny that lay behind the Westfield rampage rather than psychosis drew gasps in the courtroom.
Counsel assisting the inquest Dr Peggy Dwyer SC challenged Dr Boros-Lavack, suggesting she held that view ‘because you don’t want to accept, yourself, the failings in your care of Joel’.
Despite offering her ‘sincere apologies’ and saying of the murders she was ‘sharing the pain, it has devastated me personally’, Dr Boros-Lavack replied: ‘I did not fail in my care of Joel and I refuse – I have no error on my behalf.’
Michele and Andrew Cauchi are pictured above in their Toowoomba garden two days after the Westfield tragedy. Mrs Cauchi raised the alarm seven times with Dr Boros-Lavack’s clinic after her son was taken off his medication, but her concerns were ignored. It turns out mum knew best
Joel Cauchi (above after being shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott) was ‘floridly psychotic’ when he carried out the Westfield massacre armed with a Ka-Bar military knife
Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack (left) and her husband, businessman Richard Lavack (right)
However, in the witness box the following day, Dr Boros-Lavack withdrew the misogyny diagnosis as speculation rather than a clinical assessment.
‘It was conjecture on my part and I shouldn’t have speculated four years later after I completed his treatment,’ she told the court.
Dwyer, who described Dr Boros-Lavack as ‘the treating psychiatrist, who weaned Mr Cauchi off his medication’ asked the opinion of another medical witness.
Dwyer put it to a registered nurse referred to as RN3, who had also attended to Cauchi: ‘Is it your view that if Joel had remained medicated and mentally well, he would not have been capable of committing this terrible travesty?’
‘I think so,’ the nurse replied. ‘Yes.’
Asked if more follow-up should have been done on his condition after moving on from clinical care, RN3 said ‘It’s very, very hard.
‘People do get lost (in) follow up. With hindsight, things could have been done differently, with reflection.’
The inquest heard that people with treatment-resistant schizophrenia who are on Clozapine have a high relapse rate of 77 per cent after one year and 90 per cent after two years if they stop taking the medication.
The inquest also heard that Dr Boros-Lavack did not provide a detailed medical handover to Cauchi’s GP after he left her clinic in Toowoomba and moved to Brisbane in early 2020.
Dr Richard Grundy told the inquest that Dr Boros-Lavack did not raise any concerns about him.
‘I had nothing,’ Dr Grundy told the NSW Coroners Court.
Dr Grundy said he would have attempted some sort of follow-up with Cauchi if he had been told about the concerns his mother raised with Dr Boros-Lavack between October 2019 and February 2020.
‘I didn’t have any information – all those things that were discussed for some reason or another never came to me,’ Dr Grundy told the court by videolink from London.
On discharging Cauchi from her clinic in March 2020, Dr Boros-Lavack sent a letter to Dr Grundy.
‘Please recall Joel to discuss his options and referral to an alternative psychiatrist if required,’ she wrote.
In earlier evidence given to the coroner, Dr Boros-Lavack insisted she had a lengthy phone conversation with Dr Grundy after sending this letter.
‘I can take Joel back, I am the family GP, I know him very well and I will recall (him),’ the GP told her, according to her evidence.
However, Dr Grundy denied that this conversation took place, saying there was no record of it in his notes.
Since the Toowoomba Clinic went into financial administration, Dr Boros-Lavack and her MBA graduate husband have operated the Mi-Mind Centre (above) in Toowoomba, Queensland’s largest regional town
Joel Cauchi in Westfield, moments before he is shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott
Now operating the Mi-Mind psychiatric clinic in Toowoomba, Dr Boros-Lavack capitulated at the inquest on her original testimony that Joel Cauchi wasn’t psychotic when he entered Bondi Junction Westfield in April 2024
Dr Boros-Lavack is promoted on health websites as having ‘a special interest in the treatment of schizophrenia’ and being ‘well-versed in various therapeutic approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and supportive psychotherapy’.
Criminal psychologist Dr Tim Watson-Munro told Daily Mail Australia that these were mostly ‘chat therapies’ for people with personality disorders or anxiety.
Dr Boros-Lavack and her husband now run a psychiatric clinic, the Mi-Mind Centre in South Toowoomba.
The couple, who live in a $1.3million house at Preston, between Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, previously worked in New Zealand although Andrea is originally from Hungary.
Mr Lavack was a flight systems centre manager at the Massey University School of Aviation on New Zealand’s North Island and CEO of Squish Drinks, which pioneered a hisbiscus-based fruit drink.
In 2020, after fundraising ‘many millions’ the Lavacks opened the $9million Toowoomba Clinic offering ‘top service, luxury beds, facility already planning to expand in early 2021’.
Local media quoted the psyhciatrist as saying, that ‘the first patient discharged from the Toowoomba Clinic walked out the doors in October 2020 with tears in her eyes’.
‘When we asked, “Is something wrong?” she replied “I’m just so sad to be leaving”.’
The clinic offered a ‘holistic approach’ with psychiatry ‘and a full array of treatments’, with plans for an ‘an exercise physiologist, massage therapist, an onsite gym, a qualified diversionary therapist with an art room and a consulting dietitian’.
But by May 2024, the centre financially collapsed and local media reported that ‘patients were left in limbo’.
Bodycam footage of Joel Cauchi when he was questioned by police in 2021 after being pulled over for driving erratically through Brisbane in 2021, about two years after ceasing his medication
On May 3 a public notice was issued that the company had entered an external voluntary administration.
That collapse came years after Dr Boros-Lavack was named in the findings of a 2017 inquest held in Hobart into the death of a seven-week old baby.
The baby died on November 28, 2012 – five days after Dr Boros-Lavack had assessed the baby’s mother as competent to make medical decisions for the child.
The baby boy died from severe head trauma, a post mortem detecting a severe brain injury, fractured skull, multiple rib fractures, and fractures to both femurs and his right pelvis.
The findings note that the child’s mother didn’t protect the boy as she should have done, but that she was subject to the violence and control of her partner.
‘Child Protection Services did not protect (the boy) as it had a duty to do. If it had undertaken its duty under the Act in accordance with correct practice and procedure, (his) death would not have occurred,’ the Coroner concluded.
