‘I have taken a life’: Security guard opens up about traumatic work shooting
It started off as a bad day and became horrific for security guard Wayne Heneker who shot dead a former workmate who tried to rob him at gunpoint.
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As the gun edges closer to Wayne Heneker’s head, one word buzzes and pops and fizzes in his mind. Execution.
In that instant, Heneker imagines being shot, his body being tumbled inside his security van, the van being driven to the Gold Coast hinterland and set alight.
“They’d find a burnt-out van with me in it, dead.”
Next second, a new word.
Fight.
“That was the only thing I needed on my tombstone: ‘Wayne fought for his life’.”
And here he is, alive, the memories of that minute of mayhem ricocheting about in his head as he returns to the scene.
It’s the first time he’s come back to the Gold Coast’s Highland Park Tavern, the place where his routine as an armed security guard delivering the day’s float turned deadly on May 19, 2014.
“It’s a bit surreal being here,” he says, “knowing this is where it happened.”
Heneker walks slowly around the back of the tavern, recollecting every punch, every wrestle during that scenario dreaded by all security guards in charge of bags of loot – a holdup.
Heneker had no idea who he was fighting – the robber was wearing a motorbike helmet. Only after Heneker fired three shots in quick succession into the man’s body, after the helmet came off and the man had slumped and rolled over, did Heneker see his face.
“And I’ve just gone, ‘Oh, Shameem, you f--king idiot’.”
It was one of his own, a former workmate, Shameem Rahman, 47.
He was dead.
“That’s the weight I’ve had to carry for eight years now; I have taken a life,” says Heneker. “And it’s a club of one. I don’t have a mate who killed someone. I’m the only member of that club.”
But, says Heneker, 56, who’d already flirted with death a few times before: “Life creates you, things that happen in life create you. What happened was horrific and nearly ruined me but this is where one chapter of my life ended and another began.”
HARD KNOCKS KEEP COMING
Even before getting pistol-whipped by a robber in a motorbike helmet, Heneker had been whacked about by the hard knocks of life.
Three weeks prior, his second wife, who he loved, had ended their marriage and he was seeing his sons, Heath and Hayden, now 15 and 13, at the weekends.
His dream of being a police officer had fallen apart.
And he was feeling undervalued in his job.
When the alarm went off that Monday, he almost didn’t get out of bed.
The previous Friday, he’d had a run-in with a boss at Border Security Services after expressing his exasperation that his regular van had been commandeered for another run.
“She said to me, ‘Wayne, you’re just a security guard, it’s a low-paid job.’
Basically, it was, ‘Don’t expect too much.’
“I just walked out of that stinking hot shed, and thought, ‘I’m not coming back here Monday.’”
But he did. “I would have been letting them down and I’m not a let-down person.”
Things didn’t improve when he got to the yard.
His van had been returned but it was parked behind three other vehicles.
He trudged to the office, found the keys and started moving them.
One wouldn’t start. Flat battery.
Again, he contemplated walking away.
But he hunted down the jumper leads, gave the battery a kick and got on with moving the vehicles.
“Then I went to the weapons room, put on my Glock 19,” he says.
“I got my money and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, there’s not much here today.’
Usually on a Monday morning there’d be about $150,000 – this day, it might have made $30,000.”
He loaded his gear in the van but it was too late to rearrange it the way he liked.
“It was a rush, rush, rush morning.”
His first job was to head to Broadbeach to collect money from parking meters.
He’d remove the coin tins, empty them and take the receipt that said how much was in the tin.
Of course, given the day he was having, one meter didn’t spit out a receipt.
He put the money in the van and drove off. He’d deal with that later.
Heneker had been doing this run now for six months.
“I was carrying lots of money on some of these jobs,” he says.
“Some mornings I’d have to pick up half a million dollars by myself. Walking down Orchid Ave with a bag. I was always vigilant. Not scared, not nervous but I’m a realist. This is why we carried a gun.”
Heneker had been with Border Security for about 2½ years, his fallback job after being knocked back by the police service aged 40.
He says he was told he was a good applicant but, at the time, the service was prioritising people with tertiary qualifications.
Being an armed guard helped soften his disappointment.
“There I am, standing at a service station like an awesome dude with a couple of hundred grand between my legs while the others are putting the money in the ATM,” he says.
“I’m the one with the gun. It was a thrill.”
But the hours were erratic until he got the permanent run when the previous guard lost his licence.
Before that guard, Shameem Rahman had the run.
Rahman, Heneker says, was “very, very hot-tempered”.
“Complaints had been coming in of him swinging handcuffs at the public and running them off the road. So they took his gun off him.”
Rahman was put on an unarmed run but left soon after.
Heneker had not spent much time with Rahman, seeing him mostly as they crossed paths at the depot.
He remembers once trying to calm down Rahman about work conditions, counselling him about their place in the pecking order.
And Rahman bought him a coffee one day after they met to exchange keys.
“I thought we had an okay relationship.”
Just before 7.30am, Heneker arrived at the tavern.
Normally, he’d play it extra safe and park up the road to watch for the hotel manager driving towards the pub, then follow him.
It was something Heneker decided was a clever precaution.
But this day wasn’t going to routine.
As he neared the tavern, he took a call that upset him.
“I just forgot myself and I drove straight up into the carpark, did a U-turn and parked by the back door.”
The manager wasn’t there yet, giving Heneker a chance to reorder his van.
He slid the side door up, sorted everything and went back to the cab.
Then he remembered the tin of coins from the meter that didn’t issue a receipt.
In such cases, protocol was to write a note giving the location of the meter.
He got back out of the van, slid the door open again.
“And I’ve just seen this yellow jacket and motorbike helmet and thought ‘Postman.’
But I’ve always been like, ‘Don’t come near me, dude.’ I don’t care if you’re my grandmother, keep your distance. And so I’ve gone mate, ‘Don’t come near …’
“And bang. The gun’s come out.”
AN EVENTFUL LIFE
Heneker had looked death in the eye a few times before.
He once slid along Western Australia’s Great Northern Highway in a flipped Mack truck, his bum out the window of the cab as it careened towards a giant gum tree.
It stopped just short.
It was the second time that week the then 27-year-old, long-distance truck driver had experienced the spine-tingling horror of a rollover.
The first time, he’d nodded off, waking as the truck took out the posts on the wrong side of the road.
He overcorrected, the rig jack-knifed, and as his load of heavy steel pipes flew past, the cab flipped.
He lost his job.
So he packed up life in Perth, dropped home to Adelaide, dusted off the Ford Falcon in the shed and drove to “this mystical place called the Gold Coast”.
One of the first things he did on arriving in 1993 was join the Surfers Paradise Surf Life Saving Club.
“I couldn’t wear the dick togs, though, too brief,” he says.
“I wore AFL shorts, Warwick Capper-style.”
Back then, Heneker says, he was often mistaken for the mullet-headed AFL star.
He’s been a member ever since, patrolling every season, helping save scores of lives.
Heneker says he’s driven by a desire to help and serve – a desire thwarted more than once.
He’d been in the Army Reserve in Adelaide in his early 20s before being rejected by the regular army on medical grounds. He has clawed toes.
“I was sad about it,” he says. “Still today, I’m sad about it.”
But he burrowed into his new life on the Gold Coast, which was in the grip of the great Japanese tourism phenomena.
He taught surfing to Japanese tourists, sold them boards at a surf shop and was even asked by a member of the crime organisation, the Yakuza, to work for him in Japan.
He declined.
He did, however, fall for a Japanese woman, the daughter of a mega-wealthy, well-connected family.
This, he says, is when “my life took a dark turn”.
They married, had two children, Joel and Naomi, and lived in opulence on the Gold Coast, but it was a rocky relationship.
Heneker says that when the family visited Japan in the late 1990s, he knew he was a long way from home the moment the wheels hit the tarmac.
They separated soon after and, apart from a brief meeting with Naomi when she was 15, Heneker has not seen his children.
“I couldn’t fight it, there was no way I could fight.”
He stayed in Japan, working as a lifesaver in Chiba and in a restaurant in the coastal town of Atami.
He took some karate classes with a Samurai descendant named Tonaka-san.
And he met his second wife. They returned to Australia, marrying in 2005.
Heneker got back into driving trucks and after his bid to join the police failed, he trained as a security guard.
He once asked his instructor what it was like to be in a holdup.
“He said, ‘Mate, your arse goes like this,’ Heneker says, making a contracting movement with his fingers.
“‘Everything, everything that’s supplying blood to your body is now in your head and your heart’s coming out.’”
Which is a fairly accurate description of how Heneker felt when he first saw what looked like a Beretta pistol aimed at his temple.
Heneker says he immediately raised his hands and said, “You got me, mate.” He edged to the side, giving the robber access to the money. There was probably about $15,000 in there.
But Rahman didn’t go for the money. He went for Heneker’s gun.
“I decided that’s not happening, so I hit his arm and blocked it.”
Rahman lunged for Heneker’s gun a second time.
“And I knocked his arm away – no conversation. And he’s come in with his gun and cracked me in the nose.”
Then, with his other hand, covered in motorbike gloves with hard knuckles, Rahman whacked Heneker again in the face.
The impact sent Heneker off balance, landing on the tins and tubs inside the van, his feet off the ground.
This is the moment, he thinks. Here he is, exposed and vulnerable, with the robber moving his torso inside the van, his gun trained on Heneker’s head.
This is when Heneker thought he was about to be executed.
And when he decided to fight back.
Heneker gets teary now, saying he owes his life to Tonaka-san’s lessons.
“As the gun’s coming in, I went back to Japan, back to me being like The Karate Kid,” he says.
He remembered being taught the power of relaxing when you’re wrestling with someone on top of you with a weapon; how that sudden change in pressure can take an attacker by surprise.
“So he’s coming in with the gun and I just play dead a bit, and as the gun’s coming in, I’ve grabbed his wrist and pushed it off to the side.
“Now he’s fighting me back, fighting me back, and he’s got his weight over the top of me. I knew that gun was coming back. I thought, ‘Tonaka-san said, ‘Relax.’ I thought, ‘I could die but I’m just going to relax.’ As I relaxed, he came over to the side really fast and then I wrapped my hands around the barrel of the gun and I’ve put him in a wrist lock with the barrel pointing back in his face.”
Somehow, Heneker stands and they stumble about in a deadly embrace, crashing over a raised garden bed, lurching towards the smoking area.
“He’s let go with one hand and he’s hit me again on the side of the head.
“So I whacked him in the helmet as hard as I could. Then I see his chin guard on the helmet, so I grab it and pull it down.”
But the strap isn’t clipped and Heneker, off-balance, staggers backwards. The helmet goes to ground. His attacker’s head is down as he comes in to tackle Heneker about the waist.
“I thought, ‘If he takes me down, I’m definitely going to die.’ I took a step back and I drew my weapon.
“He’s right there, holding on to me, and I went bang, bang, bang. Shot him three times. In the upper back. All I heard was this ‘errh’. He’s slid down and he’s just rolled on to his back.”
Staring up at Heneker is Shameem Rahman, his pistol by his side.
On closer inspection by police, it was a replica.
LIFESAVER, NOT LIFE-TAKER
For months afterwards, and still now sometimes, Heneker suffered flashbacks of that frenzied attack.
“Go to sleep, you relive it,” he says. “Wake up, and it’s the first thing again. It all plays through your mind.”
But Heneker is convinced Rahman would have killed him. He had the chance to take the money; instead, he went for Heneker’s weapon.
“I needed to go home, I needed to see my children,” he says.
“He should have been going home to his (five) children, looking for another job. But he chose the night before to go to the casino and lose every cent. Why should I have to die for somebody else’s stupid, idiotic mistakes in life that have brought them to the point where they’re trying to kill me?”
Heneker did not face any charges.
Rahman was raised in Canberra, the only son and youngest child of a Bangladeshi diplomat. After his death, his sister, Nasreen Rahman, said he had good qualities but was spoiled and erratic.
She said her brother had been involved in crime as a teenager and could be “very violent”, even assaulting her several times.
He had drug, alcohol and gambling problems.
Ms Rahman offered to meet Heneker, saying she bore him no ill will.
He didn’t take her up on the offer.
“I didn’t feel it was necessary,” he says.
“I’ve got no feeling for Rahman. He’s dead, he’s gone, he’s with whoever, God or the universe. They’ve got to deal with him, not me.”
But Heneker did have to deal with his own future.
He saw a counsellor and did regular lifesaving patrols while on WorkCover for 18 months.
He bought a German Shepherd pup named Kira and started training her.
An idea began to form: he could create his own security company, Gold Coast Patrol Dogs K9.
He bought a small van and “that became my patrol car. I’d pick an area like Bundall, grab Kira and we’d do some training around office blocks and dark places.
It was therapeutic going into a dark, could-be-scary, location.
After all the adrenaline after such a life-threatening thing, I kind of needed to feel that rush again.”
He didn’t return to Border Security, instead picking up shifts with other security firms and, over time, getting work for his own venture.
Last year, after an explosion in vehicle theft at Benowa Waters, Heneker took a night patrol around the suburb.
Apart from alerting a homeowner to an open car door, it was uneventful.
But a few weeks later, he was contacted by Benowa Waters residents.
They’d heard about his extra-curricular patrol and had banded together to raise funds to employ him to do it regularly.
Shortly after, residents of nearby Sorrento did the same.
Heneker says the rates of stolen vehicles in those suburbs have reduced.
“We’re doing old-style policing: being there, being visual,” he says, admitting his team of eight casuals has no extra powers than other citizens.
“We don’t harass people. We just sit and watch. If they want to be there, we can be there, too.”
The sight of the dogs is a pretty good deterrent.
“I’ve had people try to take my weapon off me but I’ve never had anyone try to take a dog off me,” he jokes.
That day at the Highland Tavern changed Heneker’s life but not, he says, his driving motivation: to help people.
So, he roams the streets of the Gold Coast, a security guard forged by a traumatic experience and crushing disappointments in work and love, on the lookout for trouble.
Sometimes, it finds him.
Last December, about 1.30am, Heneker had just driven on to the M1, bound for a patrol in Pimpama, when he came across a car, smashed into a concrete barrier.
Flames were already rising from the engine.
He rushed to help, along with a nurse, despite others calling, ‘Get back, get back, it will blow.’
“We stayed,” says Heneker.
“If we didn’t do anything, people were going to burn to death.”
As the nurse worked to free the driver – a 12-year-old, who with four other juveniles, had stolen the car in Palm Beach – Heneker went searching for the source of screams.
“I jumped over the concrete barrier and I could see the front seat was leaning over the top of the dash and I could hear cries for help but I couldn’t see her,” says Heneker.
A girl was crumpled under the glove compartment.
Her door was wedged against the barrier, the gap in the window too small to wrench her out.
Heneker started dismantling the car, pulling at the window’s windshield protectors to make a bigger gap.
“I reached in and started pulling her out,” recalls Heneker, whose actions were recorded on his body camera and praised by police later.
“She’s screaming, ‘Help, help’.
The heat, the flames were now over the windshield, right there by us.”
Other drivers started dousing the flames with a fire extinguisher.
“I just kept pulling and pulling and finally got her torso out and her legs and we both sort of fell out.”
He helped save her life.
He’s taken one, too, but he’s determined not to let that define him.
“Here I was, thrown into a raging river with what happened and just trying to find peace. I’m a lifesaver. I don’t want to be the lifesaver who became a life-taker. I just want to be the lifesaver.”
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