History was made in WA when police charged a person for the first time with preparing a terrorist attack.<\/p>\n
“[I thought] there’s no way,” he told the ABC.<\/p>\n
“It’s like a surreal feeling. This is someone I’ve known for so long, and suddenly it turns out they’ve allegedly \u2026 planned something terrible.”<\/p>\n
Police alleged Mr Michaels spent the past couple of months plotting a “mass casualty” attack on public buildings in Perth, including the police headquarters, parliament and Muslim mosques.<\/p>\n
Alex said Mr Michaels did not like school much and dropped out of St Stephens School in Perth’s north by the end of year 10.<\/p>\n
“He wasn’t doing badly at school, I think he \u2026 just didn’t like the stuff that he was learning,” Alex said.<\/p>\n
“I guess one day, he just decided, I don’t want to do this anymore. He wasn’t really interested in thinking about what he was going to do for his future.”<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/f489ffa6897844a75949d1d5f22f7eb5.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Jayson Joseph Michaels’s school friend Alex says he couldn’t believe the offences.\u00a0 (ABC News: Daryna Zadvirna)<\/p>\n
Over the next several years, the pair grew apart and eventually lost contact altogether.<\/p>\n
Mr Michaels’s Instagram\u00a0posts were often strange and nonsensical. They stopped completely by\u00a02023.<\/p>\n
Alex recalled it was around the time Mr Michaels and another friend bonded over their Christian faith.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2ca06798a30c96b1ad9c631c7e4562fb.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Some of the knives police seized from the home of Jayson Joseph Michaels.\u00a0 (Supplied: WA Police)<\/p>\n
“They were talking about reading the Bible like pretty much every day, and I think that was kind of the point where I started to kind of drift away from them,” he said.<\/p>\n
Alex said neither he, nor other former school friends, saw the news over the weekend coming.<\/p>\n
“I think shock [was] definitely a universal feeling among the cohort,” he said.Young men vulnerable to radicalisation<\/p>\n
WA’s Joint Counter Terrorism Team \u2014 made up of WA Police, the Australian Federal Police and ASIO \u2014 last week confirmed they had been investigating Mr Michaels’s online activities.<\/p>\n
It was alleged he used the encrypted social media app Telegram to spout hateful ideology, which led officers to raid Mr Michaels’s home in Bindoon.<\/p>\n
It was where police allegedly found “a manifesto-style document outlining plans for an ideologically motivated attack of violent extremism involving mass casualties”.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/14bcb177b73589d5bc3629c675d97dd0.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Ben Rich says radicalisation is increasingly happening online.\u00a0 (ABC News: Rhiannon Shine)<\/p>\n
Curtin Extremism Research Network director Ben Rich said radicalisation was increasingly happening online and some young men were particularly vulnerable.<\/p>\n
He described it as “a witches’ brew, a perfect storm”.<\/p>\n
“Particularly if you are someone who is not a part of a real in-person community, you consume your worldview primarily online, where you have algorithms that are specifically designed to cultivate your hatred and anger,” the professor said.<\/p>\n
Dr Rich suggested part of the solution was ensuring vulnerable people had the right safety nets.<\/p>\n
“Things like housing, health care, professional futures,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When I talk to young men, there is often a sense of despair that there is nothing for them to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We need to think about how we strengthen that social contract.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of Jayson Joseph Michaels’s former friends recalls him as like any typical teenage boy \u2014 slightly edgy,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[25653,64,63,9832,18610,257570,255286,257567,44,17174,17173,46,86,1158,205849,51905,257569,257568,25962,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-514899","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"tag-attack","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-christian","12":"tag-extremism","13":"tag-ideology","14":"tag-jayson-joseph-michaels","15":"tag-mass-casualty","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-news-perth","18":"tag-news-wa","19":"tag-perth","20":"tag-perth-news","21":"tag-police","22":"tag-radicalisation","23":"tag-terror","24":"tag-terror-act","25":"tag-terrorism-act","26":"tag-wa","27":"tag-wa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}