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<docID>334501</docID>
<postdate>2024-12-03 13:35:11</postdate>
<headline>No jail for couple after &#8216;abhorrent&#8217; neo-Nazi incidents</headline>
<body><p><img class="size-full wp-image-334499" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20240924193276763816-original-resized.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="590" /></p>
<caption>Taylor Bayly and Christopher Carrig have been sentenced for painting Nazi slogans at a university. (Duncan Murray/AAP PHOTOS)</caption>
<p><span class="kicker-line">By <strong>Duncan Murray</strong> in Sydney</span></p>
<p><strong>A young couple have been spared jail for a hateful neo-Nazi graffiti spree at a major university campus despite a magistrate labelling their behaviour as abhorrent.</strong></p>
<p>Christopher Carrig, 20, and Taylor Bayly, 20, were sentenced on Tuesday over the vandalism at Macquarie University in the early hours of January 25, 2024.</p>
<p>The pair were ordered to reimburse the university for the cost of the damage.</p>
<p>Carrig was also sentenced over an anti-Semitic incident in which he intimidated a 20-year-old man at a bus stop, who he targeted for being Jewish.</p>
<p>The encounter was filmed and posted to social media.</p>
<p>During the interaction, Carrig told the man to remove a Jewish kippah - or skullcap - he was wearing and ordered him to kiss his shoes, Sydney's Burwood Local Court heard.</p>
<p>The 20-year-old also told the man: "It's quite low for a Jew to be waiting for the bus. Can't you call uncle Goldstein and ask him to bring you a BMW?"</p>
<p>Carrig's lawyer Rylie Hahn said her client had recently experienced significant trauma with the tragic deaths of two family members.</p>
<p>"His mother and sister recently and tragically passed away," she said, adding that incident meant the young man had to move out of his family home.</p>
<p>Police located the bodies of the woman and her teenage daughter in July at an address in Marsfield in Sydney's north, prompting a major forensic investigation.</p>
<p>About a week before the bodies were discovered, a police search of Carrig's home revealed what a prosecutor on Tuesday described as "more or less a shrine to the Third Reich".</p>
<p>Carrig was given some of the Nazi paraphernalia by his late mother, the court heard.</p>
<p>At the time of spray-painting the Nazi slogans at Macquarie University, both Bayly and Carrig were intoxicated and were acting in response to a socialist poster they had seen, Magistrate Mark Whelan was told.</p>
<p>The pair admitted to blackening their faces and entered the northern Sydney campus before they graffitied offensive symbols, including swastikas, across 24 locations.</p>
<p>The slogans included "f*** Antifa scum" and "Heil Hitler", as well as references to the Australian neo-Nazi group National Socialist Network.</p>
<p>Carrig and Bayly, who have been in a relationship for about three years, have matching tattoos of the numbers "14" and "88" behind their ears, which carry neo-Nazi associations and were clearly visible as they faced court.</p>
<p>The two numbers are common white-supremacist code, according to the Anti-Defamation League.</p>
<p>Mr Whelan sentenced Bayly to serve a 15-month community corrections order, while Carrig was handed a two-year intensive corrections order in lieu of a full-time jail sentence.</p>
<p>The magistrate described the offending as "abhorrent".</p>
<p>"It has no place in Australian society," he said.</p>
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