Crescent Head police shootings: A town remembers on 20th anniversary
CRESCENT Head is a typical sleepy coastal hamlet where surfing and easy living is the way of life. But in one night the renowned surfing mecca became famous for something else.
NSW
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CRESCENT Head is a typical sleepy coastal hamlet where surfing and easy living is the way of life. But in one night the renowned surfing mecca became famous for something else.
Twenty years ago Senior Constables Peter Addison and Robert Spears were killed after responding to a report of a domestic violence in the town.
I was 15.
I remember it vividly as it forever changed the shape of the town I grew up in.
In the early hours of that morning, my family and I were woken from our sleep by what sounded like gunshots but we thought it must have been fireworks or the backfire of a car.
Gun shots in Crescent Head were just unheard of, weren’t they?
But as I was being driven to work just before sunrise, we knew something terrible had happened.
A helicopter landed at a sporting field and swarms of police invaded the town.
They were darting in and out of the tree lines.
We were stopped on the way out of town by police who asked several questions, which they repeated over and over.
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“Who are you and where are you going?’
Later we found out, that at that moment, they thought the killer was still on the loose and didn’t know he had turned the gun on himself.
People turned on the radios to hear the message “stay indoors and don’t come out”.
Everyone who lived in the town when it happened have their own stories to tell.
There were those who had bullets fly through their homes.
There were those who knew the policemen.
And then there was me, a teenager, who wondered how could something like this happen in Crescent Head.
That sort of thing happened in the movies or Sydney, didn’t it.
While the surfing and easy living hasn’t changed these days, that fateful day is forever etched in Crescent Head’s history.
Schoolchildren walk past a memorial dedicated to the fallen police officers every day on their way to school, a reminder of the lives lost that day.
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