Two senior members of Darwin chapter of Rebels outlaw motorcycle club sentenced to seven years’ jail for ordering axe attack

TWO senior members of the Darwin chapter of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang have been sentenced to seven years’ jail for ordering a revenge axe attack on a rival.

President Andy Summerfield, 24, and sergeant-at-arms Shannon Althouse, 31, pleaded guilty to giving the order to attack Tyrone Kerslake on October 5 last year.

But in a case of mistaken identity, their underlings targeted Kerslake’s flatmate Bradley Jewell instead.
In a victim impact statement Justice Jenny Blokland read from during sentencing, Mr Jewell said the beating – which resulted in wounds including a chipped vertebrae and multiple skull fractures – left him experiencing frequent flashbacks and “physically incapable of functioning as he did before the attack”.
“He talks about the excruciating pain, that he just wanted to pass out during the attack, he talks about the blood and that he was so scared he thought he was going to die,” she said.

Justice Blokland described the men’s crimes as “frightening and confronting offending, motivated by revenge”. She said the pair’s high ranking within the Rebels helped explain their motivation to “enlist others to do their dirty work for them”, but “the fact they had others carry out the offending does not mitigate the offending”.
“While being members of a gang, outlaw or not, does not aggravate the assessment of the objective factors of the offending itself, it does give context to the motivation and informs the reason for the apparent impunity with which the two offenders thought they could enlist others to do their dirt work for them,” she said.

In her sentencing remarks, Justice Blokland was also critical of the Rebels as a whole, taking a swipe at the gang’s constitution which was submitted to the court as part of the proceedings. “If this offending were not so serious, it would be regarded as a joke by reasonable people,” she said.

Justice Blokland noted the men’s prospect of rehabilitation would be “poor if they remained associated with the Rebels but reasonable if they broke those ties”.

Summerfield will be eligible for parole after serving three years and six months behind bars, while Althouse will serve a non-parole period of four years.

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