‘Shattered lives’: Elevator stabbing victim’s family pleads for harsher knife crime laws

Andrew Sullivan was in a lift trying to get home when a group of young men turned on him. One of them pulled out a kitchen knife and stabbed him as he tried to get away. His partner found him bleeding profusely on the floor.

The 42-year-old could not be saved and died in hospital from his injuries. “I haven’t gone near an elevator since that night,” Sullivan’s partner of nine years, Desiree Schmidt, told a court on Wednesday. Andrew Sullivan was stabbed in a lift.



Credit: PR IMAGE His devastated family, who filled Melbourne’s Supreme Court for his killer’s pre-sentence hearing, called for knife crime laws to be strengthened. “There must be an end to knife violence ..

. it’s shattering lives, it’s taking lives and there needs to be harsher consequences,” Sullivan’s sister said outside court. “We can’t just act on the precedence of what’s been sentenced before, because it’s rampant.

“The laws need to be changed, they need to be more severe.” Sullivan’s killer, Kloud Allen, is facing up to 25 years behind bars after pleading guilty to manslaughter and an additional armed robbery charge over an unrelated incident six days prior..