Strathfield massacre
1991 mass shooting at a shopping mall in Strathfield, Sydney, Australia
The Strathfield massacre was a shooting rampage at Strathfield Plaza in Strathfield, Sydney, Australia, on 17 August 1991. The shooter was Wade Frankum, who killed himself as police arrived at the scene. The incident left eight dead including the gunman and six wounded.
Massacre
At around 1:00 p.m., Frankum went to Strathfield Plaza, a shopping centre in the Inner West of Sydney. He sat in a café called The Coffee Pot, where he drank four cups of coffee.
At approximately 3:30 p.m., apparently without provocation, Frankum pulled a bowie knife from an army surplus duffel bag and turned to the table behind him occupied by two teenage girls, killing 15-year-old Roberta Armstrong by repeatedly stabbing her in the back.
Leaving the knife in the body of the girl, he pulled a Chinese-made SKS semi-automatic rifle out of his duffel and shot around the café, killing five more people. He then shot the café's owner dead and fled into the main area of the centre, where he killed his last victim.
Frankum ran into the rooftop car park and held a car owner at gunpoint, demanding that she take him to Enfield, a nearby suburb. Before the woman could start her car, police began to arrive on the scene with Constable Darren Stewart the first to arrive.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7622106. Authority coordinates are -33.873, 151.093. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Strathfield massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.