Derrick McManus: SA Police officer shot 14 times in Barossa siege returns to Kokoda to help men’s mental health
Derrick McManus was a hard-edged STAR Group cop who was within seconds of dying when shot 14 times. But a touching scene brought him to tears, and has inspired his next move.
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Derrick McManus has arrived at one of the most picturesque war memorials on the planet. He’s at Isurava on the Kokoda Track, the site of one of the most important battles in Australia’s military history and one entrenched in our nation’s folklore.
The former SA Police STAR Group officer who famously survived being shot 14 times during a siege in the Barossa has hiked through the jungle, mostly uphill, to get here.
He’s now sitting on the steps of the Isurava memorial, in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, taking in a majestic view as the sounds of a nearby river, wind rustling through the trees and jungle birds fill the air.
As he looks northeast along the memorial, four black granite pillars stand between where he sits and a spectacular vista over the Owen Stanley Range.
Each of the polished pillars is engraved with a single word representing the values and qualities of the Diggers who fought here: Courage. Endurance. Mateship. Sacrifice.
The poignancy of the moment and the location is overwhelming for some, and McManus notices some of his fellow trekkers are starting to cry.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” he thinks. But he’s not feeling anything. And then he does. Soon he is sobbing.
The similarities of what the Australian soldiers did for each other here in World War II and what his mates did for him in the Barossa back in 1994 are too hard for his mind to ignore.
Each of the words immortalised on the memorial are equally applicable to the STAR Group officers who braved a gunman’s bullets to rescue him.
And so he cries. Like a baby.
“They (his fellow police officers) risked their lives to save me – they put it on the line,” he says as he recalls that moment on the Kokoda Track back in 2009.
“In the briefing they had prior to coming in, the boss said: ‘We don’t know whether Derrick’s dead or alive – you may be going in to pick up a body and there’s a real risk you may be shot and injured, you may be shot and killed as well.’
“Every one of them had the opportunity to say no, this is too dangerous. And in my mind, that would have been the logical thing to do.
“But every one of them stepped up to the plate, to say this is the job we signed up for. Derrick’s on the ground. We want to go in and get Derrick. And they literally put their lives on the line to come in and to get me. And it all came together at Isurava.”
JOINING STAR GROUP
McManus, 66, is talking at his kitchen table and we’re here to unpack why he’s returning to Kokoda in a few weeks to raise money and awareness about men’s mental health and gender-based violence.
But first we need to turn back the clock even further – back to May 3, 1994 when he and a team of fellow STAR Group officers are called to arrest Tony Grosser after he had failed to appear in court for 179 fraud charges.
McManus is 35 at the time, has been a STAR Group member for five years and a police officer for 10 years before that.
He moved with his family from the Scottish midlands to Adelaide’s northern suburbs when he was three and joined the police force before his 17th birthday. By the time he is 30, though, he is bored with police work and finds himself scanning newspaper advertisements looking for a new career.
Someone suggests joining the STAR Group instead. He does some research and it ticks all the adrenaline, leadership and problem solving boxes he is seeking.
So he applies, passes the intensive three-day training course and settles into a working life that ranges from carrying out high-risk arrests, counter terrorism, cliff rescues, sieges, helicopter operations and security for VIPs from Queen Elizabeth II to Paul Keating.
I FELT NO PAIN
McManus says the five years as a STAR Group officer leading up to his shooting provide him the physical and mental foundations to deal with the event which would change his life.
Grosser has a history of threatening police and owning weapons, so police know there is a risk as they approach his front door about lunchtime on that Tuesday in May, 1994.
When he doesn’t answer the door, McManus ventures around the side of the house towards a glass sliding door. He takes five steps before Grosser spots him from the hallway and starts shooting.
The gunman fires 18 rounds from his Chinese military rifle, hitting McManus 14 times. But he only feels two of them.
“I had absolutely no idea I was being shot,” he says. “Didn’t hear the sound, didn’t feel the pain, didn’t feel the impact at all – all I knew was I was falling to the ground.
“I was reaching out to the door and all of a sudden I was falling and I had absolutely no idea why and I was berating myself: ‘Highly trained STARRY, what the f--k is going on, you’re an idiot’.
“And half way to the ground I looked at that glass sliding door and there were suddenly small holes that hadn’t been there just a moment before – and then I heard the sound of gunfire.
“I still hadn’t felt the impact, but as I’m falling to the ground, I just start saying to myself, ‘Derrick, don’t be too hard on yourself because if you’re getting shot, it’s quite acceptable to fall over’.”
TIME SLOWS DOWN
By the time he hits the ground the reality of his situation has set in. The final two bullets slam into his left thigh. He feels those ones and the impact sends shockwaves through his body. There is still no pain but he berates himself again for staying on the ground for so long.
He knows he needs to fire back but realises just in time that he is lying on his back and his feet sit between his gun and where he needs to shoot. Another random thought runs through his mind – if he manages to shoot himself in the foot, he’ll be the subject of ribbing from colleagues for the rest of his life.
Time has slowed down by this stage. It feels like 30 seconds between the last two bullets hitting his thigh. But in reality, there are only five seconds between the first and last of Grosser’s 18 shots.
McManus knows he has 15 shots in the magazine of his Sig Sauer 9mm and another in the chamber. He has 16 rounds to fight back with and doesn’t want to waste bullets so gives himself a goal of firing six or seven shots.
With his adrenaline pumping though, he lets fire 13 times. It’s enough to stop the barrage of bullets heading his way and he rolls to his right a couple of times and gets on his feet, despite his massive injuries.
PEPPERED WITH BULLETS
A later stocktake of his battered body would reveal:
TWO bullets lodged in his stomach. Surgeons cut him from sternum to groin to extract the bullets. He lost 45cm of bowel from his small and large intestines and wore a colostomy bag for six months.
TWO bullets hit his left thigh, missing his femoral artery by the width of a piece of paper. He is still missing 30 per cent of his upper leg.
ONE bullet slammed into the radius bone and severed the radial artery on his left forearm. The bullet also shattered, creating a wound that effectively “took out the whole inside” of his arm.
ANOTHER piece of shrapnel lodged in his right wrist and is still there.
A BULLET ripped through his right ankle, taking out 80 per cent of the Achilles tendon. He still has only 20 per cent of that tendon. Ironically, in the 30-plus years since, he has strained his good Achilles a couple of times, but never the bad one.
THREE bullets hit the back of his left calf and another hits the back of his right knee.
A CERAMIC plate in his flak vest stopped a direct hit under his heart.
THE groin flap of his body armour stopped another bullet, preventing significant damage to his femoral arteries.
TRAIL OF BLOOD
But McManus doesn’t know any of this detail as he staggers his way towards the back of Grosser’s house in an attempt to find safety. He leaves a trail of blood as he moves past a dog kennel and his shattered right arm folds back on itself when he leans against a wall.
His mind flicks to a scene from 1988 film The Naked Gun, when OJ Simpson’s character Nordberg is peppered with bullets on a boat but his day gets even worse as he staggers around the room and knocks his head against the wall, burns his hand on a fireplace, ruins his jacket on wet paint, gets his fingers jammed in a window, face plants a wedding cake and puts his foot into a bear trap.
It’s a ridiculous but hilarious scene and McManus embraces its presence in his mind because he knows humour can play a vital role in breaking the tension that, if left unchecked, has the potential to rob him of the ability to cope, both mentally and physically, with his current predicament.
McManus had long ago realised there was a chance he could be shot and killed on the job, and had talked with his wife about what her life might look like without him. And he also had a conversation with himself, and visualised what might happen to both his body and his mind if he was shot and survived.
This mental preparation is critical, he says, in helping him survive the Barossa shooting.
CONTROLLING PANIC
“I put together the processes that just fell into place on the day,” he says.
“And basically it came down to controlling panic – don’t let panic take control of the situation; control shock – don’t let shock take control of my body; slow down my heart rate; and slow down my breathing.
“I knew if I could do those four things that would slow down my rate of bleeding. I’d survive a little bit longer but I’d also be able to think more creatively, constructively and access my higher-level problem-solving brain.”
Part of that problem solving involves calling out, letting his colleagues know he has been hit but still alive and calling out again to let Grosser know he is still capable of returning fire.
It also involves crawling to the house’s rear wall after his hand gives way and he falls to his knees, and taking refuge under a kitchen window for the next three hours as his colleagues work on a rescue plan.
Grosser, meanwhile, moves into the roof of the house and is shooting in a 360 degree arc at anything that moves. He holds police at bay for the next 41 hours – the longest siege in SA history – and fires nearly 2000 rounds of ammunition.
LOSING TOO MUCH BLOOD
McManus knows that, barring Grosser, the biggest threat to his life is loss of blood, so he makes a conscious effort to sit with his two largest wounds – on his left arm and left leg – above his heart.
He also maintains a grip on his pistol, keeping his finger on the trigger but removing it occasionally to flex it and ensure it is still functional.
He knows he is losing a lot of blood, knows he is badly hurt and knows there’s a chance he might not make it.
But he’s determined to keep a positive mindset, so ponders the prospect of life in a wheelchair. Maybe he’ll take up wheelchair basketball? Maybe he could make the Paralympic team? Maybe he could one day win a gold medal?
Ultimately though, his body starts to shut down as the massive blood loss takes its toll. His limbs close down and the pistol drops from his hand after about two hours and 40 minutes. Five minutes later he loses vision.
“There just wasn’t enough blood going to my brain,” he says. “It (the world) didn’t go to shakes of grey or black, it went to an absolutely pristine white, and I’ve thought to myself, ‘This is it – this is what they talk about.’
“At that point I’ve gone, you know something, I need to fight harder – and I’ve started talking out loud to myself, saying, ‘Derrick don’t give up, Derrick keep on fighting’. The entire three hours I was out there I had absolute confidence that my mates would be doing everything they could to get in to me.”
And they were.
SECONDS FROM DEATH
He is drifting in and out of consciousness by the time his rescuers rush in to evacuate him, risking their lives and dodging Grosser’s bullets as they do so.
“Thank f--k you guys have got here,” he says, before they drag him away from the house, first to cover and then to an ambulance, where acclaimed trauma specialist Dr Bill Griggs is waiting.
Griggs can’t believe McManus is still alive. His patient is white, covered in blood and does not appear to be breathing. Griggs thinks he is dead but for the next 15 minutes he and his team fight to save the officer’s life – as rounds from the gunman whiz around their ears.
McManus’s heartbeat drops to a dangerously low level and he is just seconds from death. But as Griggs and his team squeeze fluids and blood into his body, his blood pressure rises and his condition stabilises.
By the time he arrives at Royal Adelaide Hospital via chopper, nine units of blood have been pumped back into his body and in the seven hours after extraction he uses a total of 24 units of blood or blood product. The average human body holds just 10 units of blood.
Grosser is finally arrested, charged and convicted of attempted murder and five counts of endangering life. He successfully appeals against an initial conviction in 1999 but is found guilty following a second trial in 2002 in which he represents himself.
He is sentenced to 22 years’ jail with a non-parole period of 18 years, and released from Yatala Labour Prison in 2016.
PANIC ATTACK
McManus undergoes six hours of surgery and spends 28 days in hospital.
About three days after the shooting, he experiences a massive middle-of-the-night panic attack and when he returns home there are persistent bad dreams – one that even morphs into what he describes as a pseudo nightmare.
But the mental preparation that had stood him in good stead during the shooting also pays dividends in his recovery. He expects mental health ramifications of what he had been through, so isn’t overly concerned when they emerge.
“I didn’t go, ‘Oh my God, I’m weak. This is stupid, you shouldn’t be doing this, you should be stronger than this’,” he says.
“I just go, ‘Yeah, these things happen to other people. It’s happening to me. How do I best manage it?’. And so I wasn’t harsh on myself.”
He attends one, three-hour session with renowned trauma psychologist Professor Sandy McFarlane who clears him to return to the STAR Group but reinforces that depression and post-traumatic stress disorder might affect him in the future.
HIGHS AND LOWS
And that’s just what happens.
A couple of years after the shooting, McManus’s marriage breaks down, his dog dies and the stress of attempting to get back into the STAR Group is mounting. His physical training regime drops and the quality of his sleep and diet diminish.
He doesn’t recognise these as symptoms of mental health issues but visits a doctor in the hope he can be prescribed a pill or vitamin to fix his dietary woes.
To his surprise, the doctor diagnoses him with mild depression and mild PTSD.
After an initial couple of seconds of disappointment, he immediately moves into fix-it mode, and asks the doctor what steps he can take to remedy things.
“Because I had spoken to the psych, I knew the mental health issue could hit me at any time – there is no linear process for it,” he says.
“To this day, something could happen and it could take me right back to the day of the shooting. I went away and did exactly what he told me to do for a month … and because I was aware of it and I didn’t fight it, and I just went with that process, the fact that I’d gone to see him early and caught it while it was really, really mild, I was able to reverse it straight away.
“Now I notice those highs and I notice lows. We all go through them, everybody goes through them.
“If we deal with the low … proactively, we can stop it going down into depression but if we don’t deal with it, it will go into clinical depression, and that’s where I was.”
BACK TO KOKODA
Spreading the word about the benefits of talking openly about mental health is the primary driver behind McManus, who retired from SA Police in 2018 after 42 years, heading back to Kokoda in August.
He’s part of a group called Kokoda Centurions that is raising money and awareness for charities Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation and The Man Cave and has a goal of fostering resilience, support, and community networks, while breaking cycles of violence and fostering positive masculinity and mental health awareness.
“We’ve come together to make an environment where men can make better decisions,” he says.
“We are going away to a place where the four pillars of Kokoda – endurance, mateship, courage and sacrifice – provide just the message that needs to be delivered to people who want to make better decisions.
“We had such a great bonding experience and grounding experience while we were in Kokoda (in 2009) and we could see that this would benefit other people.”
The inaugural Kokoda Centurions trip, from August 22-31, will include sessions from Breakthrough Mental Health chief executive John Mannion and Lindsay Marchment from The Man Cave.
McManus, now a professional speaker and corporate trainer, will also lead a fireside chat drawing on themes he has finetuned over the years about human durability and sustained optimal performance.
He’s confident the rich emotional experience of trekking the Kokoda Track, combined with open discussions about mental health, will be profound.
“We want to empower people to come back and have better conversations, more comfortable conversations – just talk about it and make people realise that they are not alone, other people have gone through this too,” he says.
“It’s OK to be angry, it’s OK to be upset, it’s OK to have nightmares, have flashbacks, have panic attacks. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means that you’re the same as everybody else, but there are ways to manage these things.
“You could have those conversations here (in Australia) and it’d be a nice conversation. You could walk Kokoda on its own and it would be a nice walk. But if you combine the two, the outcome is going to be life-changing.”
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