SA Police pioneer Joanne Shanahan’s family reflects on grief, forgiveness and lessons from the fatal crash that rocked the state
The family of top cop Joanne Shanahan have spoken about forgiveness, their grief and the lessons to learn from a tragedy such as theirs.
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The Shanahan family refuses to let negative emotions about Harrison Kitt dominate their lives.
Mr Kitt is behind the wheel of the vehicle that smashes into the Shanahans’ new Holden Acadia on Anzac Day, 2020 and kills their wife and mother Joanne.
Initially, Peter Shanahan simply blocks Mr Kitt from his mind. Over time, this morphs into forgiveness.
This is Part 2 of a special feature on the tragic death of Joanne Shanahan. READ PART 1 HERE
When a court finds Mr Kitt not guilty of two counts of causing death by dangerous driving because of mental incompetence, Peter says he forgives him and hugs the young man’s parents.
He adopts a similar mindset to the one he has used to overcome the natural human tendency to look back and wonder what if. What if Joanne had been driving? What if they had stopped for a two-minute conversation before leaving home? What if they had decided to drop by on Joanne’s parents for a chat on the way to The Good Guys? What if...
“It’s taken me ages to practice this mantra that I have of ‘all we’ve got is now’ and if we can be the best person that we can right now, there’s actually nothing else we can do – nothing else,” he says.
“All we have is now, right now. So contemplating what could have been, would have been, it’s a complete waste of time and emotional energy for me to be thinking about those things.
“Of course you think about it. Of course. But there’s no efficacy in it, other than to make yourself feel worse. And you’re making yourself feel worse, so you’ve got to concentrate on the now and be the best person you can be.
“And that’s what I am learning to do. What I’ve learnt to do since this extraordinary moment in my life where I knew from that moment onwards I needed to be a person that would carry on the legacy of that amazing woman and those fantastic children that we have.
“To do that I have to be the best person I can be right now and there’s a whole lot of things that go with that like being grateful for what you’ve got and not concentrating on what you have lost.”
MAKING MUM PROUD
The natural progression of this, Peter Shanahan says, is to forgive Mr Kitt and he knows this is hard for many people to understand.
“If I didn’t forgive him, then I’m carrying something around with me that he sort of owns of me, really… this awful feeling of displeasure,” he says. “Whatever it is, I refuse to have it. I refuse to have that feeling.”
Nick, now 29 and working in IT, says he’s “more disagreeable” than his father and he’s not sure he’ll ever forgive Mr Kitt for what the court heard was one of “the most egregious examples” of dangerous driving in state history.
But he’s been conscious of avoiding the sometimes addictive but equally exhausting mindsets of misery and anger.
“You get to the point when it’s like ‘jeez, am I really just gonna feel like this all the time? It sucks – there has to be something better than this’.
“It’s really hard to say something like this and it doesn’t sound trite, but Mum would not have wanted me just to be a miserable loser for the rest of my life, right? She would have wanted me to actually do something.
“For me, it was finding peace in the things that I can control... I wanted to make myself into somebody that mum would be proud of.
“And by doing that I focused on my own attitude and how I could make myself better and how I could treat the people around me in a way that if they died, or I died, there’s nothing really left on the table.”
A SAPOL PIONEER
With that in mind, he’s forever glad the last thing he said to his mother was that he loved her. That was on April 24, 2020, the night before she died, as he was walking out the door to accept an invite for dinner and a sleepover at Morgan’s house.
He was leaving with a tinge of disappointment. Only moments after accepting Morgan’s invitation, a knock on the door signalled the arrival of a meal of succulent ribs his parents had ordered from the restaurant Hereford Beeftouw in the city.
As always, there was plenty of food to go around. It’s a family tradition born out of Joanne’s rich Greek heritage. She was the middle child of Greek immigrants and joined the police force in 1981 despite the initial protests of her parents.
She was a cadet stationed to Burnside CIB in 1983 where a 20-something Peter Shanahan, complete with pornstar moustache, was assigned to teach her the ropes. They soon became inseparable and five years later enjoyed a traditionally large Greek wedding.
A few years down the track Nick came along. Then Eleni. The family enjoyed holidays to Kangaroo Island at least once a year. The island holds such a special place in their hearts they spread some of Joanna’s ashes there.
Nick and Eleni remember their mother as a “pretty chilled out” maternal figure, someone who often invited their friends to the family home without even asking or telling them.
At work, she was a pioneer. She was the first commissioned officer to return to the force after having children. She had graduated as a detective by 1991 and went on to serve in leadership roles at Elizabeth CIB, the state’s domestic violence investigations unit and Multi-Agency Protection Service – also known as MAPS.
Only months before her death, she fronted a media conference in her role as acting assistant commissioner and pleaded with drivers to be safe on the roads.
RETURN TO THE SCENE
Two days after Anzac Day, 2020, Peter, Nick and Eleni return to the crash site to offer their thanks to those who have left multitudes of flowers and notes in her honour.
That night, blue lights illuminate venues including the Entertainment Centre, Adelaide Oval, Convention Centre, Town Hall and Parliament House in her memory.
The following week, hundreds of family and friends join thousands of police, paramedics, firefighters and volunteers to line the streets as her cortege makes its way to the funeral home.
It’s an outpouring of emotion and respect that reduces the family to “blithering wrecks” despite a pre-departure rev-up speech from Peter about the importance of remaining stoic.
Grant Stevens speaks at the funeral, describing Joanne as someone who influenced, inspired, motivated and supported so many people.
“She was one of a kind and we are lesser for her not being with us. Jo was a dear friend. We miss her and we will remember her,” an emotional Mr Stevens says.
Mr Stevens remains a close family friend and when his son Charlie is killed in another traffic fatality that shocks the state four years later, the Shanahans are part of the tight-knit SAPOL community offering their support.
INTENSITY OF GRIEF
Peter Shanahan is now 68. He retired in February after 50 years’ service for SA Police.
His children have welcomed Peter’s new partner Penelope Jane Knowler into the family, a development he says Joanne would endorse.
“Jo would not want me to be sitting in a corner sucking my thumb being miserable – no way,” he says. “And if she was driving that day and I was the one crushed next to her, I’d expect her to get on with her life too.”
The family raised a glass for what would have been Joanne’s 60th birthday last year. There are still moments of intense grief. Of sorrow at the same level as it was in the days after her death. But as time passes, the frequency of these moments slowly dissipates.
Eleni is now 27 and drives to Stirling each day to run the niche men’s clothing store she bought from her godmother. It was months before she could bring herself to brave the intersection where her mother died.
For two years she changed her running route to avoid the crash site. She runs past it now, but won’t stop there. She’s also more likely to throw caution to the wind and advise anyone weighing up a big decision to do the same.
“If someone asks me for my opinion, I’m generally like, ‘well, bite the bullet – if it’s something you want to do, go ahead and do it because who knows what’s going to happen’.
“I definitely have not been great to my bank account sometimes now because I just think, ‘screw it, who knows what’s going to happen’.
“A lot of people think I’m older than I am because I am probably a little bit wiser than I used to be. I feel like I’ve just kind of become my own person a lot more now, I don’t really care about what other people think about me.”
DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
Dealing with Anzac Day, of course, continues to be tough. Nick has been to a couple of dawn services since his mother died. Peter and Eleni are yet to reach that milestone.
The family makes sure they are together but stay out of town on each anniversary of Joanne’s death and for the first couple of years Peter endured intense flashbacks at the exact time of the crash.
Each year, though, the day is becoming more manageable and they have come to embrace the tradition of people laying flowers on the crash site on Anzac Day.
“At first it made me really sad (when I saw those flowers) but this year I saw there were heaps of flowers there and it honestly just made me really happy,” Nick says.
“Because I know that there are so many people mum had helped and whose lives that she had touched that I would never know about and mum never told us about.
“But they still have that connection and for people to take the time out of their day to do something like that… that just makes me really happy, honestly. I feel really lucky.”
The Shanahans know they are also lucky to have had the love and support of a large group of family and friends and are mindful that not everyone going through such tragedies has the benefit of such a network.
FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS
With that in mind, Peter is now a board member of SA Police Legacy, which provides financial, emotional and social support to officers and their families. He’ll be telling his story at a National Police Legacy Day function at Adelaide Oval on June 17, where his message will be clear and simple.
“There are people out there that are able to help you live your life to its fullest extent, even when tragedy hits,” he says. “And everyone has tragedy in their life. Everyone’s tragedy is a different one but the reaction is exactly the same and you need people around you to help you deal with that grief – this is a normal human reaction.
“Police Legacy is here to help and we all have an obligation as loving humans to make sure that we help people deal with those awful times.
“There are a lot of people out there who don’t have the same resources available to us in friends and family and an organisation like SAPOL who will wrap you up.”
The Shanahans are telling their story in the hope their journey might help others dealing with a traumatic situation.
The lesson, Peter says, is to live in the moment, to be the best person you can right now and to be grateful for what you have. It’s a simple motto, he says, but “God, it’s hard to do”.
They still think about Joanne all the time. Nick still wears the ring she gave him for his 21st birthday. Eleni jokes that she honours her mum by decking herself out in lots of jewellery and doing “copious amounts of shopping”. And they talk about her every day.
“She’s in our every conversation,” Peter says. “She’s not off limits, and that’s a wonderful thing. She’s alive for as long as we talk about her and love her and think about her and she’s in our hearts.”
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