Territory Response Group sergeant told Kumanjayi Walker’s shooting by Zach Rolfe was no ‘execution’

A Territory Response Group sergeant has told the Kumanjayi Walker inquest he was trying to put ‘context’ around Zach Rolfe’s actions as the shooting might be seen as an ‘execution’.

An elite police officer told relatives of Kumanjayi Walker he was shot because Zach Rolfe “thought he was going to die” to avoid the “misconception that this was simply an execution”, a court has heard.

Coroner Elisabeth Armitage is presiding over a three-month inquest in the Alice Springs Local Court into Mr Walker’s death after Constable Rolfe was acquitted on all charges following the 2019 police shooting in Yuendumu.

On Wednesday, Territory Response Group Sergeant Meacham King, who arrived in the remote Aboriginal community in the hours after the shooting, told the court he was trying to “probably put a bit of context on that”.

“I guess the aim there was to try and say ‘there’s a lot more to this’,” he said.

“Aboriginal people, you talk to them and they start saying ‘no reason, no reason’, but trying to explain to them, ‘there’s a lot of other factors here, he didn’t just walk into a house and just shoot him in cold blood’, so to speak.

“We needed a bit of narrative out there about how it happens.

“I am really conscious of the bush telegraph and how it works and I just didn’t want them to think that, to go out that it wasn’t what it was.”

Under questioning about the exchange from Parumpurru Committee of Yuendumu barrister, Julian McMahon SC, Sergeant King agreed he was trying to convey that “there’s been an act of self-defence by the shooter”.

“From my perspective as a police officer, I probably thought it was justified,” he said.

But he agreed that, at that time, he was “creating a narrative which you wanted to control” and “had no idea whether it was true”.

“For all you know, he was excessively violent and filled with malice, for all you know, do you accept that?” Mr McMahon asked, to which Sergeant King replied “there’s always a potential”.

“I wasn’t there, so there’s no way I could have determined whether that actually happened or not, yes,” he said.

“But again, I had to weigh up the situation of the end result, which was to make sure no one else got hurt.”

Sergeant Meacham King said there was ‘a real risk’ the shooting would be seen as ‘an execution killing’. Picture: Jason Walls

Under questioning from Constable Rolfe’s barrister, David Edwardson KC, Sergeant King said he was aware “that there was a real risk” the community may have believed Mr Walker’s death was “an execution killing or a shooting for no reason at all”.

Sergeant King said he was aware at the time that Constable Rolfe had been stabbed with a pair of scissors, which “are probably one of the most dangerous edged weapons you can use”.

He said in his experience, it was “quite common for some Indigenous people to use or carry them”, sometimes “cut in half”, which “creates an even greater danger”.

“And you knew, when you made that comment we have just mentioned, you knew that from the information you had at least, that Zachary Rolfe had been stabbed with a weapon such as that?” Mr Edwardson asked

“I’d been told he’d been stabbed with a pair of scissors that night, yes,” Sergeant King replied.

The inquest continues on Thursday.