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‘My little sister was crying, all my nieces and nephews, all the kids were crying screaming, we all ran.’ Picture: Supplied
‘My little sister was crying, all my nieces and nephews, all the kids were crying screaming, we all ran.’ Picture: Supplied

How riot police surrounded and searched a Darwin community for a gun that didn’t exist

SATURDAY, October 13, 2018 was the end of a busy week for Helen Secretary.

As chairwoman of the Gwalwa Daraniki Association that administers the Minmarama and Kulaluk Aboriginal communities on Dick Ward Dr, Helen’s diary is generally full with meetings and appointments.

This week, she’d also been unwell, so Helen took the opportunity to sleep in while her partner, Mark Hopkins, looked after the couple’s 10-year-old daughter.

“I got up wondering where they were so I stuck my head out and they were sitting at the table, Mark was reading a paper,” she says.

“I walked back in, made my coffee, grabbed my smokes, walked out and waited until he finished reading the paper and then just had a basic conversation.”

Earlier that day, Mark told her, he’d seen two men who weren’t locals, trying to steal scrap metal from a neighbour’s place and had sent them packing.

After some verbal back and forth, the two men left and Mark thought little more about it.

Then Helen’s phone rang.

The woman on the other end said she was a police officer but then the line went dead.

About and hour later, the phone rang again.

This time it was a male sergeant whose name Helen recognised from an incident police had attended at the community a couple of months earlier, in which a person was stabbed and a minor scuffle, involving Mark, ensued.

The sergeant asked Helen a series of questions about who lived in a number of different houses at Kulaluk — her neighbours — and she told him.

“About 20 minutes to half an hour later he calls back and informs me that they were told someone in the community was walking around with a firearm, no names,” she says.

“I informed him that no one in this community owns any firearms and that every member of the houses he inquired about, they don’t own firearms.

“He then said he will get back to me.”

After another half-hour or so the phone rang again, this time it was a woman who asked to speak to Mark but wouldn’t say why and eventually Helen passed the phone over.

“I could hear the conversation and Mark’s basically explaining to them, ‘No, I haven’t been out hunting for a while and yeah I had a gun back in the ‘90s but I sold it at the buyback and no, you’re safe to come down here, no one in the community owns a firearm, what’s this about?’,” she says.

“And then he comments ‘You’re a negotiator? What’s this about? No one owns a gun, you’re safe to come down’, so then he looks at me and says ‘Here Helen, this is a negotiator’.”

Helen took the phone back and repeated her assurances that there were no guns in the community and police were welcome to come and speak to them in person and would be safe to do so.

Heavily armed riot police surrounded Darwin's Kulaluk town camp in October last year after reports of a person with an illegal firearm. Picture: Supplied
Heavily armed riot police surrounded Darwin's Kulaluk town camp in October last year after reports of a person with an illegal firearm. Picture: Supplied

But the woman insisted the family leave the house, so they and other residents started filing out onto the street.

What they didn’t know was that by this time the community had been surrounded by dozens of heavily armed tactical police from the Territory Response Group, who they could now see standing around watching them through the trees.

“We all start gathering, everyone’s coming out of the units and out of the houses and we start walking with (Mark), he’s in the lead, my 10-year-old daughter at the time and all of us (are with him),” she says.

“Before we could even get to the second house the truck comes in, everyone’s jumping out with weapons, one on the intercom ‘Back away, back away’.

“But by that time when they jumped out with the weapons, everyone that was with the kids — we were all walking together — ran.”

Helen’s adult daughter, Lynette Nelson, remembers it like this.

“All of a sudden, I can’t even remember how many of them, they just hopped out and they had those big guns and they were literally pointing at us, the first thing I did was I grabbed my daughter and I ran, I was that scared,” she says.

“My little sister was crying, all my nieces and nephews, all the kids were crying screaming, we all ran.”

Helen Secretary (second from left) with her daughters Raeleena Secretary, Lynette Nelson and Hope Hopkins were at home at Kulaluk when the TRG descended. Picture: Katrina Bridgeford
Helen Secretary (second from left) with her daughters Raeleena Secretary, Lynette Nelson and Hope Hopkins were at home at Kulaluk when the TRG descended. Picture: Katrina Bridgeford

WITH Mark now in police custody under suspicion of illegally possessing a gun, the officers told Helen they would need to search her house and the others they’d been asking her about on the phone.

“I turned around (and said) ‘What if I don’t?’ and they turned around and said that if we don’t allow them to search the community for ‘safety’, they will not leave this community,” she says.

“All the mothers and kids were still in the same house where they ran because they were scared, it was getting late, no one went to have a feed at their houses, everyone just gathered together because they were scared, traumatised over it, so I basically said ‘OK’ — I had no option.”

Despite the extensive search, police found nothing suspicious and later released Mark without charge, telling Helen that would be the end of the matter.

But Helen was adamant it wouldn’t.

Instead, she took the NT Government to the Supreme Court where she is seeking punitive damages over the “siege”.

“We were being treated like terrorists in our own community without any weapons while they had all the weapons,” she says.

The parties are now working towards a settlement after Associate Justice Vince Luppino ruled there was a “a prima facie case of entitlement to punitive damages” based on evidence supporting a finding that “police indiscriminately pointed their weapons at community members”.

Helen Secretary confronts one of the TRG members alongside the officers’ armoured tactical vehicle. Picture: Supplied
Helen Secretary confronts one of the TRG members alongside the officers’ armoured tactical vehicle. Picture: Supplied

But Helen doesn’t want her family’s treatment at the hands of police that day swept under the rug.

“We weren’t like other communities like Port Keats, Borroloola or Groote Eylandt where there’s riots, we’re a little community, we’re all family and we didn’t do anything that day and we didn’t deserve to be treated like that,” she says.

“How would they do it if people were out in the suburbs? Would they jump out and (point) weapons at mothers and kids out in the public? Yet we’re a community and this is how we get treated?

“If you live out in the suburbs they wouldn’t do this, they wouldn’t surround the whole suburb and traumatise mothers and kids, they would go directly to that house, what they did to us was wrong that day, very wrong.”

Whatever agreement is reached with the government, Helen says the scars left by the 3.5-hour ordeal remain.

“Four weeks ago my (four-year-old) granddaughter came from the units — she always goes home (again) — I said to her ‘Look, nanny’s going to have a bit of a rest now, are you going to go home?’ she walks (away) and I’m watching her, a paddy wagon drives through and she comes running back with her bunny ‘Nanny, nanny, police!’,” she says.

“It has affected the community people in how we’re dealing with the police now and as a community leader I don’t think I’ll try and communicate much with the police and help them anymore.

“It’s very hard for me to say that because I am the chairperson (of the GDA) but the way we were treated that day was not necessary, they came in as if (they) were ready for war, the way they were dressed, the assault rifles, that tactical truck that they used, it was not necessary.”

Associate Justice Vince Luppino ruled there was evidence to support a finding that “police indiscriminately pointed assault rifles at community members”. Picture: Supplied
Associate Justice Vince Luppino ruled there was evidence to support a finding that “police indiscriminately pointed assault rifles at community members”. Picture: Supplied

FIVE months later, Dwayne Reichelt was at home in Rosebury having a few drinks with a mate when he made a very bad decision.

Reichelt’s property backs onto the bike path and public street on Roystonea Ave and it was there he attached a cardboard target to a chain-link fence.

He then made his way back onto his patio where he loaded a .22 calibre rifle, put his eye to the scope and started firing shots at the target, the bullets passing through the fence and out into the night.

Reichelt’s neighbour, off-duty police officer Rodney Hayman, heard the slugs striking the road, a guard rail and a street sign and in “fear for the safety of the public”, he called it in.

In response to the active shooter report, three uniformed police were dispatched to Reichelt’s unit where they found two rifles, three spent .22 cartridges and the cardboard target — now riddled with bullet holes.

Despite what police described as the “real and present potential” for any one of the bullets Reichelt fired to hit a pedestrian, cyclist or motorist causing “serious harm or death”, he wasn’t arrested.

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Instead, Reichelt was issued with a summons to appear in the Darwin Local Court in August where he pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm under the influence of alcohol and discharging it towards a public street “in a manner likely to endanger, frighten and annoy”.

In handing Reichelt a $3000 fine, Chief Judge Elizabeth Morris said his conduct on the night would have made everybody who heard the shots “in a very urban area” feel unsafe.

“You’re also lucky,” she said.

“I see Palmerston police officers turned up at your place despite the fact that they had a report from somebody who knew what they were talking about that somebody was firing in that area.

“(You’re lucky) you didn’t get the full TRG coming round and causing yourself a great amount of jeopardy because they might have thought there was an active shooter in the area.”

A spokesman for NT Police declined to comment.

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Original URL: https://www.ntnews.com.au/news/special-features/in-depth/how-riot-police-surrounded-and-searched-a-darwin-community-for-a-gun-that-didnt-exist/news-story/16e4b83228c2b13fb60f1f8bf9cb7df4