Police officer Casey Blain’s family still feels pain of loss

POLICE officer Casey Blain had a beautiful family and a job he loved, but a tragic accident cut his life short and changed everything for those around him, writes Kate Kyriacou.

EVERY day for eight years, Casey Blain sent a text message to the woman he loved to tell her so. And then, one day, he didn’t.

Lena, his wife, was behind the camera at a photo shoot that day.

A newborn baby is hard to wrangle, so when her phone rang, she let it go to message bank.

It would be her husband checking up on her, she laughed to the baby’s mother.

But it wasn’t Casey calling.

It was his colleagues at Mareeba police station, desperate to get hold of her before she heard the most terrible news she’d ever hear through a small town grapevine.

Her husband was dead.

A week before Casey Blain died, he turned to his wife and asked: “Do you think we’ve done everything we want to do?”

He was only 29 and Lena had joked he was having an early midlife crisis.

She told him they had a great life. They’d worked hard.

They had a son, Mark, who was nearly five. They had a house. They’d travelled overseas and were about to fly out for another trip to the UK.

Casey had the career he’d always dreamed of.

Ever since he was a little boy, he’d wanted to be a police officer.

It had shaped his whole life. He’d always tried to do the right thing; he’d been a protector.

That was five years ago. It was Easter and with their UK trip looming, Casey had agreed to relieve in Georgetown, a tiny community in the state’s north several hours from their hometown of Mareeba.

Constable Casey Blain and son Mark. Picture: Tom Lee

Working extra shifts over Easter would give them spending money for their trip. Lena had agreed. She was a photographer and would be shooting an Easter wedding to help fund their holiday.

It was March 29, Good Friday, and his first day on the job at Georgetown.

Casey was driving the police 4WD when he lost control of the vehicle, hit a bridge and died.

“He always wanted to help people,” Lena said. “And he said to help people, you need to start with the youth. You’ve got to be a community police officer and live and breathe the community.”

Casey had applied to be a police officer the minute he was able. But he was told he was too young. They’d wanted people with life experience. So he got a job as a water technician.

He would talk relentlessly about wanting to join the police service. It drove Lena crazy. One day she printed out the application forms and filled them out for him, telling him to sign his name, that it was “now or never”.

He signed.

Casey, who sang in a band, belted out the national anthem at his police graduation. Lena laughed as she described him as sounding “pompous” as he sang, filled with nerves at the presence of the police hierarchy.

This was her larrikin husband, who’d proposed to her down the front of a Pete Murray concert, shouting out his love to her from bended knee.

Casey Blain and his wife, Lena.

Casey Blain's father Ray and son Mark. Picture: Andrea Falvo

This was the man who had serenaded her with the soppiest of love songs at their wedding – a distraction while their friends snuck off to cover her car with toilet paper.

This was the boy, who, got up one morning with a pink stripe in his hair, announcing to his bewildered parents that he was going to be a “rocker”.

“His mother said, `what’s that?’ and he said, `I’m in a band’,” Casey’s father Ray recalled.

“We laughed. He’d never played an instrument. I said `what are you, the roadie?’ And he said `no, I’m the lead singer’.

“We had heard him sing from time to time in the shower, but that was about it.”

But Casey was good. And he was an entertainer. He could read a crowd.

While performing at the local RSL, Casey spotted a rough looking man walk in with hair down to his waist. He broke into George Thorogood’s “Get A Haircut”. The RSL erupted. Only the man with the hair didn’t get the joke.

“He could defuse a situation really quickly. But at the same time, always be a joker. He was very quick. He always had something for the situation,” Ray said.

“Out on patrol he’d quiz other cops about the music they liked. Then he’d sing the exact opposite.”

Casey had been an only child. Ray said he and his wife Lynette had put great expectations on their son to do well in life. And he had. He’d joined the Army Reserves and done so well they’d wanted him to make a career out of it.

But being a police officer had long been his dream. He’d wanted to help young people.

It had been a shock to him, the amount of youth crime he’d encountered when he started out. He’d wanted to be a school based officer to steer kids on the right path. Get them while they’re young.

Before he died, he’d been told he’d got a spot doing just that at a school in Mareeba. He’d been beyond excited.

Casey Blaim’s funeral service with full police honours.

It is a tragic irony that on Thursday, a ceremony to name police boats after Casey and another officer who died in a crash, Sergeant Dan Stiller, was postponed because a third officer, Constable Peter McAulay, was hit by a stolen car – allegedly driven by two youths.

Lena Blain tells her son about his father every day. Mark Blain looks like his dad. He has the same sense of humour. Sometimes he makes funny comments that are word-for-word things his dad had said.

Lena and Mark have spent the past two and a half years travelling the outback in a caravan. Mark has been home schooled in that time.

A car crash thrust Lena into the life of a single mother. She would go to work each day and Mark, now 10, would go to school. They would pass each other in the hallway. It wasn’t enough.

“I was losing my boy,” Lena said.

“We’ve been on the road every day since. And he’s been to so many places, it’s indescribable.”

Police chaplain Doug Foster was one of the last people to speak to Casey. He’d dropped in to Georgetown to see him on the way to visit family in Cloncurry.

He’d liked the young officer. Casey had been part of the service’s peer support program. He was “terribly empathetic”, Doug said.

Not long after arriving at Cloncurry, he was on his way back.

“It’s terribly sad,” he said.

“He wanted to make a difference. He was a genuine person. He treated people with respect.”