A 17-year-old teenager was on Wednesday sentenced to 12 years in jail – the longest prison sentence Sweden has ever given to such a young person – over the triple murder. Södertörn District Court found him guilty of three murders and seven attempted murders.

A 16-year-old boy, then aged 15, was found guilty of instigating the murders and sentenced to ten years in jail.

The judge said that the sentences corresponded to lifetime imprisonment for an adult person.

According to the court’s ruling, seen by The Local, the killing spree took place at the peak of Sweden’s gang conflict last autumn between the so-called Foxtrot gang and a rival breakout group, which saw the brutality brought to new heights with even the innocent relatives of gang criminals actively being targeted.

On October 12th 2023, the 17-year-old, then 16, entered a home in the suburb of Västberga, south of Stockholm, and shot dead a 40-year-old father of two young girls.

He then went upstairs, where he found the mother with the youngest of the couple’s children, a two-year-old. He told her to turn around, before he shot her in the back.

He fired his gun several times. One of the bullets went straight through the woman’s body, continued through the Winnie the Pooh plush toy that the child was clutching, and injured the child.

Miraculously, the child and the mother – a doctor, who was able to stop herself from bleeding to death by pressing her hand into the bullet hole – both survived.

“We think they were hugging each other. The mum was hugging the child and the child was hugging Winnie the Pooh. This is the most horrific criminal case I’ve ever had,” the Aftonbladet newspaper has previously quoted the mother’s legal counsel as saying.

The family had no connection to gang crime. It’s believed to be a case of mistaken identity, as they shared a surname with a criminal.

The following day, the shooter went to the house of a well-known artist in Tullinge, south-west of Stockholm, whose family happened to be related to a gang criminal.

There, he killed a 60-year-old grandmother and a 20-year-old woman described as the family’s “bonus daughter”. The older woman’s 33-year-old daughter and her three underage children were in the house at the time, but were physically unharmed.

“The same perpetrator goes to the homes of people he doesn’t know, shoots his way into the house, searches for and in cold blood shoots the people he comes across. It’s so awfully brutal,” lead investigator Annika Teckner told Swedish news agency TT.

“In addition to the investigative work, the police officers have to deal with the children at these crime scenes where there are dead bodies. They sit with them, try to defuse the situation, as if that is possible. Once the crime scenes have been secured, they are carried out with blankets over their heads so that they won’t see the horror,” she said.

The court also found a third man, aged 22, and a 16-year-old girl, guilty of aiding and abetting, and sentenced them to 16 years in jail and juvenile detention, respectively.

Police have raised concern of gang leaders recruiting younger and younger people to carry out serious crimes, luring them in until they’re trapped in an escalation of violence.

This month, Sweden and Denmark announced a joint response to gang crime, vowing to step up information-sharing and efforts to prevent the recruitment of young criminals.

Rebecka Lewis, legal counsel of the woman in Västberga, told Aftonbladet that one of the hardest things for her client during the trial had been that the accused showed no regret.

“It would have felt better for her if they had confessed and shown their regret. But this total detachment that they showed was difficult for my client,” said Lewis.

“But my client feels no need for revenge, but rather a sense of resignation and sadness for society. How can such young people do this to a family with children? They are in turn also victims in some way. Where did it go wrong?”