Hayes had a documented history of mental health crises stretching back at least six years. In 1987, he was forcibly admitted to the maximum-security wing of Graylands Hospital after experiencing paranoid delusions, where he was treated for schizophrenia. His encounters with the law accumulated alongside his illness: breaking and entering a delicatessen in 1987, stealing counter-terrorist equipment from the Special Air Service Regiment barracks in November 1992, and illegal possession of a firearm in April 1993. Some reports alleged ongoing police harassment as a possible trigger, though this remained disputed. What is clear is that Hayes was a deeply unwell man who had fallen through the cracks of both the mental health system and the criminal justice system.

After ramming the Wembley police station, Hayes piloted the 12-tonne vehicle toward the Perth CBD. The APC carried no ammunition, but a vehicle that size does not need a gun to cause destruction. He smashed through the security gates at police headquarters, crushing six police vehicles, a motorcycle, and several private cars. He then turned his attention to the Criminal Investigation Branch building before circling Parliament House on the hill above the city. Throughout the rampage, Hayes displayed a strange adherence to road rules that became the defining detail of the night: he used his turning indicators at intersections and stopped at a red traffic signal. The juxtaposition of obedient driving etiquette inside a stolen armoured vehicle struck the media as darkly surreal.

Police negotiators attempted to talk Hayes down as he circled Parliament House, but their efforts failed. The breakthrough came from three special forces officers who managed to climb onto the moving vehicle. They pried open a hatch and dropped a tear gas canister inside. Hayes struggled but was overpowered and arrested. When journalists later asked Brigadier Terry Nolan how an APC could be stolen so easily from a military base, his response became one of the incident's most quoted lines: "If you'd have asked me this yesterday I would have said it's not easy to do it, but the evidence of this morning would indicate that it's perhaps easier than I would have thought."

The media largely treated the event as bizarre and darkly comic, an approach that sidestepped the more difficult questions about Hayes's mental state and the systems that had failed him. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to four and a half years in Casuarina Prison, with the possibility of parole after seventeen months. It was the first incident of its kind in Australia; a second would occur in Sydney in 2007. Hayes died in 2017, his later years largely unrecorded by the press that had once turned his worst night into a punchline. The incident remains a cautionary example of what happens when mental illness goes untreated and security assumptions go untested.