When the sun rose over the iron-mining town of Port Hedland in Western Australia’s far north on the morning of August 4, 2014, Ms Dhu was entering the final stages of septic shock.
As the infection multiplied in her bloodstream and spread through her system, not one police officer believed the 22-year-old when she told them over the intercom that she’d lost all feeling in her legs. Instead, word had gotten around the station that she was just another drug addict going through withdrawal who was either “faking” her pain or playing it up to get attention.
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That has been the picture sketched during the second sitting of the coronial inquest into the death in custody of Yamatji Aboriginal woman Ms Dhu, whose full name won’t be used here for cultural reasons.
After a three-month delay, 17 police officers have spent the past two weeks giving evidence about the role they played in the final days of the life of Ms Dhu, who’d been arrested along with her abusive ex-partner on August 2, 2014 for $3,622 in unpaid fines.
On August 4, just two days later, Ms Dhu lay dead in the emergency room of the South Hedland Health Campus. The official cause of death was severe staphylococcal septicaemia and pneumonia, resulting from complications of a broken rib. Medical experts who testified last November said her death had nothing at all to do with drugs.
But even in Ms Dhu’s final moments, even as senior constable Shelly Burgess and constable Christopher Matier pushed Ms Dhu, slumped in a wheelchair, through the hospital’s emergency waiting room, nothing seemed to shake the police’s belief that she was faking it. Both testified they’d been told by their boss, Sergeant Rick Allen Bond—or maybe by someone else at the station—that she was just another junkie in withdrawal and that was the end of the story.
Carol Roe (Aunty Carol) grandmother of Ms Dhu with supporters, protesting outside Central Courts building in Perth. Photo by Charandev Singh.
It was only when a triage nurse told the officers Ms Dhu had died at 1:39 PM on August 4, 2014, (after doctors had spent 53 minutes trying to revive her) that they realised what had happened. Burgess wept and Matier was “shocked.”
Just 90 minutes had passed since Burgess and Aboriginal liaison officer Sophie Edwards, who was related by marriage to Ms Dhu though had never met her, had gone down to the cell to find Ms Dhu lying on her back asking for help. She’d told them her leg had gone numb and was asking for the hospital. When the pair went to get Sergeant Rick Allen Bond, he told them : “I am coming to the cells with you, this is bullshit, she has been twice before, she is faking it.”
In the cell, Sen. Constable Bond and Sergeant Burgess tried talking to Ms Dhu, who didn’t have the strength to sit up, let alone stand. When Burgess tried to help her to sit up, she ended up dropping Ms Dhu, whose head slammed against the concrete floor. Burgess checked the floor for blood, but didn’t ask Ms Dhu if she was okay nor did she check the 22-year-old’s head for a wound.
After this, CCTV footage played for the court shows Bond entering the cell and moving Ms Dhu into a sitting position. At 12.37 PM, Burgess said Bond bent down over Ms Dhu and whispered to dying woman that she was a “fucking junkie,” a detail Burgess had initially left out of her notes and had not mentioned to Internal Affairs.
Carol Roe (Aunty Carol) protesting outside Central Courts building in Perth. Photo by Charandev Singh.
“He said to her, ‘You are a fucking junkie, you have been to the hospital twice before, and this is not fucking on… you will fucking sit this out. We will take you to hospital but you are faking it,” Burgess said while giving evidence on Monday.
When Bond, who has now left the force and is living in Queensland, gave evidence on Wednesday, he denied that he’d told Ms Dhu she was “a fucking junkie.” He said he may have swore at her he said, because that is how people communicated in the Pilbara, and he may have called her a junkie in conversation with other people, but never to her face.
He did, however, remember telling her they would take Ms Dhu to a hospital. Only no one thought it necessary to call an ambulance. Instead Constable Matier, who has since received a promotion, was asked to take Ms Dhu to hospital in a police vehicle. When he went into her cell to find she could not walk, Matier dragged her to the cell door and handcuffed her because he thought she might be lying. From there, he and another officer carried Ms Dhu to the back of a police vehicle.
Carol Roe (Aunty Carol) with protesters in Perth. Photo by Charandev Singh.
It’s this kind of casual indifference which forms the most horrifying part of the case. It points to a pattern of neglect, one Matier appeared to acknowledge last Friday while being cross examined by Peter Quinlin, the lawyer representing Ms Dhu’s mother and grandmother.
Peter Quinlin: This was a typical night, wasn’t it? Or a typical shift?
Constable Matier: Yes. It was. Yes. Being a Monday it’s—typically very busy with prisoners.
But also, it’s… there’s nothing really unusual about, can I suggest, the lack of attention given to Ms Dhu here. It’s pretty typical of the way in which the lookup operated?
Yes, yes. I agree. Yes.
Ms Dhu’s mother, Della Roe. Photo by Charandev Singh.
Which after four weeks of testimony is pretty much be the story that has come out of that Perth courtroom. People took one look at Ms Dhu, a poor, 22-year-old Aboriginal woman, struggling with an abusive relationship and saw in her an addict who wasn’t to be believed. Then she died for it.
The only question now is what makes it into the Coroner’s report when it is finally delivered. Will anyone be held ultimately responsible? Will anyone answer for what has happened? At stake are professional reputations of medical and police personnel, the integrity of powerful institutions, potential criminal prosecutions and thousands of dollars in compensation claims.
None of which will change the fact a family has lost a daughter.
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