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A survivalist caught hiding a “serious” arsenal of weapons, including machine guns, should leave the zombie killers to their “silly games” a judge has urged, sentencing him to prison.
Aleziah Tolkein Spiers was caught illegally storing 16 dangerous weapons, including under the floors of a shearing shed on his former father-in-law’s property in central Victoria where he had run survivalist workshops.
Amateur actor and doomsday prepper Aleziah Spiers.Credit: Instagram
The weapons found had belonged to a 62-year-old man Spiers had met through his network of doomsday preppers.
After a tip-off, police searched the property in Clarkefield, north-west of Melbourne, where Spiers, 30, also had a locked shipping container full of survivalist gear.
Spiers told police he believed the farm would be a good place to “bug out in the event of an apocalypse-type scenario”.
His stash included three machine guns, multiple semi-automatic rifles, including one that had been shortened, and several single-barrel bolt-action rifles as well as knives, chemicals, daggers, a slingshot, a crossbow and a sword.
Police also found a semi-automatic handgun in the 30-year-old’s bedroom.
On Monday, County Court Judge Michael Tinney jailed Spiers for two years and four months.
He ordered him to serve at least 15 months of the sentence and pay a $2800 fine.
The judge said a psychologist believed Spiers’ insight into his behaviour and his strange mindset was far from complete.
“It really is not particularly rational to be preparing for the end of the world,” Judge Tinney said, noting it had been a sizeable focus of Spiers’ life for many years.
He had developed distorted or strange views of the world, acted in movies based on those scenarios, and clung to them in the real world.
Those views were driven, the judge found, by his failure to establish a fulfilling military career and as something to cope with the lack of a trajectory in his life.
Spiers had been a rifleman in the Australian Army for two years and aspired to work in the special forces, or in counter-terrorism with the Australian Federal Police.
To his survivalist network he had projected a persona of having special skills because of his military background, despite having never fulfilled those goals and later having been sacked from a job with Youth Justice.
Spiers’ hopes to resume a relationship with his two young children should provide a strong incentive for him to abandon or shrug off his mindset and “leave zombie killers and survivalists to their silly games”, Judge Tinney said.
His weapons stash was a serious arsenal in the wrong hands, he said, noting even if Spiers had attempted to legally possess any one of the weapons for his survivalist purposes an application for a firearms licence would never have been approved.
AAP
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