Kumanjayi Walker inquest: Cousin recalls disarming community

Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin has recalled the moments immediately after the teen was shot dead by police, and why she was compelled to record a gathering outside the station.

Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin has told of the critical role she played in disarming angry Yuendumu residents and maintaining calm in the moments after learning her close relative had been shot by police.

Samara Fernandez-Brown was the first witness to give evidence in the inquest into Mr Walker’s death at the Alice Springs Local Court on Wednesday after he was fatally shot by Constable Zach Rolfe in 2019.

Ms Fernandez-Brown said she was on her way home from her grandfather’s funeral in the remote NT community on the evening of November 9 when she saw a group of women in obvious distress.

“Because there was such an intensity of emotions, we pulled over in front of the house to then inquire about what was happening,” she said.

“I wasn’t clocking everything because there was just a lot happening but then my mum realised and she went into a state of very high emotion and we sat there just trying to figure out what was happening.

“At that point, my family had assumed that Kumanjayi had died, so they were saying that and I was trying to remain as calm as possible and not jump to conclusions, try and calm people down.

“It just seemed impossible, impossible, for me, I was like there’s no way that that could have happened.”

Ms Fernandez-Brown said from there, she and the other women went to house 511 where her cousin had just been shot three times during the scuffle with Constable Rolfe and his partner James Kirstenfeldt.

“By that point, the men had started coming in from the cemetery, into the community, and so we all then gathered and walked over together,” she said.

“I looked around and I could see those sort of line marks in the ground, which were drag marks, at that point I had assumed that they were, and then from there everybody got into vehicles or started to make their way over to the police station.”

It was then Ms Fernandez-Brown said she saw some of the men were carrying weapons as they walked towards the police station where the officers were holed up with the fatally wounded Mr Walker inside.

“I remember being like ‘Don’t react like this, give me your weapons’ and they were very forthcoming,” she said.

“In my personal opinion, I think it was a reaction but there was no real desire to cause any harm, I think it was just a protection reaction.

“Because as soon as I asked for it and as soon as I said ‘You’ve got children’, or ‘You could get yourself in trouble’, they were very forthcoming in giving me everything they had.”

Ms Fernandez-Brown said the group of about 100 community members continued on to the police station where they waited for answers and she made the “hard decision” to start filming the scene on her phone.

“Everybody was so emotional and I am quite a private person and I’ve never gone live on Facebook before but there was a lot of people around me, family members, were saying ‘We need to go on live’ or ‘We need to record this’,” she said.

Kumanjayi Walker.

She said she felt if she didn’t make the video record “nobody’s going to believe this, nobody’s going to believe that we were calm outside the police station”.

“There would have been this concept that outside we were doing the wrong thing so I just needed to prove that that wasn’t happening.”

During her evidence, the court was played the video’s Ms Fernandez-Brown filmed on the night, in which community members are seen milling around outside the police station.

“We’ve been asking the police to just come out and tell us if he’s OK and what’s happening,” she is heard saying.

“All of the medical staff from Yuendumu left this morning so there’s nobody there to give him medical attention, we don’t even know if he’s alive.”

Suddenly, the calm is broken as two police cars and an ambulance are seen speeding out the back of the police station, with what those watching on assume is their loved one on board.

It would not be until the next day that they would learn Mr Walker had already passed away.

When asked by Counsel assisting the Coroner, Peggy Dwyer, what she thought would have happened if the community had been told on the night, Ms Fernandez-Brown said most people were too worried about potential reprisals to have become violent.

“As Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, we know that there is a general response and again, we know that we have to be on our best behaviour,” she said.

“We were already angry and distressed and fearful and there could have been a reaction there but it was subdued by elders and community members because they knew that, we believed, if there was a reaction then it could have prompted another shooting or that kind of reaction.

“It’s just such a hard thing to process, being in that situation, because from our perspective, everybody there, we had done everything to comply and to be respectful and to be conscious of everybody’s safety and then to not have anything, any regard given to us, it’s devastating.”

The inquest continues on Wednesday afternoon.

Earlier, Warlpiri elder Robin Japanangka Granites told the court informally that Kumanjayi was “a quiet young man who his family loved”, but who, since the shooting, had been “blamed for his (own) death”.

“This coronial inquest to kartiya, non-Indigenous people, is another step towards understanding what happened,” he said.

“To us yapa, that’s Indigenous, this is also our life. The impact of the violence was inflicted in a home (on) a young 19-year-old family member shot down by a police officer, in his home, in front of his family in his community and captured on a camera for the world to see.”

Mr Granites said it was time to “stop this injustice where a young man has lost his life”.

“We fight for Kumanjayi and we will never stop fighting for justice, not only because of our love for Kumanjayi, but for the love of young people in our community who deserve to live a free life, free of fear,” he said.

“No one deserved to die this way and Australia cannot allow it to happen again, for this to happen again.”

Wednesday’s hearings are to begin at 9.30am.