McCrow introduced herself to Brough and the two exchanged pleasantries. Brough, Arnold explained, “is our newest first year”.
A moment later, the first shot rang out. Arnold was fatally shot.
Within minutes McCrow was shot and wounded. While taking cover and tending to her wounds, she used her bodycam footage to continue to record the desperate scenes. Gareth Train approached. McCrow pleaded for her life but was shot dead at close range.
Kirk’s bodycam also was operational. He hid behind a tree and called for assistance.
“He’s shot Rachel, I believe. She’s dead … there’s two of them. They’ve got Matthew’s gun now.”
Gareth and his brother Nathaniel Train knew where Kirk was and fired shots in his direction. Kirk fled under fire and made his way back to the police cars.
Brough hid in light scrub and remained there for hours despite a fire lit by the Trains licking at her feet less than a metre away.
An hour later Alan Dare, 58, entered the property, having seen the fire grow. He acted out of neighbourly concern but was shot in the chest and killed by Gareth Train.
Brough was just eight weeks out of the police academy. All four police officers were in their 20s and were cutting their teeth in general duties. They carried their side-arms – 9mm Glock pistols with 15-shot clips, no match for the lethality of high-powered rifle rounds.
Ryan needs to investigate why relatively inexperienced police officers were sent into that hellscape, unaware of the dangers and outgunned. There were so many red flags around the Trains’ behaviour it is difficult to know where to start.
What was known by Queensland police at the time of the ambush was that Nathaniel Train had crossed the NSW and Queensland border at the Boonangar Bridge, 17km from the Queensland town of Talwood in December 2021.
The bridge was closed because of Covid restrictions but Nathaniel drove his 2004 LandCruiser through the border gate before becoming bogged. A farmer came to his assistance and got the vehicle back on the road.
Later, after flood waters subsided, the farmer discovered three loaded firearms along with dumped personal documents that identified Nathaniel Train.
Nathaniel’s vehicle with a book value of $25,000 was left at the location and remained there for a year until police seized it after the Trains were shot dead by the Queensland Police Service’s tactical response group.
In August 2022, another police officer attended the Trains’ property but made no contact with the trio and left a card at the gate. The officer made several calls to the premises, to no avail.
Any senior police officer at local command level would have come to a belief that the four officers who clambered over the fence at the Train property were entering premises where firearms were present and that the Trains were expecting a knock on the door.
In the wake of the ambush the Queensland police commissioner at the time, Katarina Carroll, announced that there had been a risk assessment done before the four police officers entering the property and said: “They were comfortable going to this job as a BAU (business as usual) job.”
With the smoke still thick around Wieambilla, Assistant Commissioner Tracy Linford announced that the Trains’ actions did not amount to domestic terrorism. Two months later, in a confused and confusing press conference, she changed her mind. The Trains were premillennialists, we were told, an arcane theological branch of Christianity steeped in spiritual and physical preparedness for the end times.
The religious affiliation is almost irrelevant, perhaps only of any real interest to academics and counter-terrorism experts.
Where the danger lay was not in religious belief but how the Trains had supplemented their religious views with other extreme ideologies associated with survivalism and the violent fringes of the anti-vax and sovereign citizen movements.
They had become radicalised based on a belief that police were their enemies.
This, too, should have been known at local command level before constables McCrow, Arnold, Kirk and Brough were briefed and sent out to confront the Trains.
Gareth Train in particular had left a large footprint on the internet. The Trains lived in an echo chamber where vicious rhetoric became normalised and where braggadocio blended with brutal intent.
Gareth Train’s violent elegies were all over the internet if one knew where to look.
Had local command been unable to conduct relatively complex internet searches, then counter-terrorism data analysts should have been contacted. They would have returned within hours with yet another red flag associated with the Trains.
Before the Wieambilla ambush, I had learned that a group attached to protesters outside the Old Parliament House in Canberra had discussed seizing the building and forming their own government. It was preposterous, of course, but the threat lent itself to violence and unsuspecting staff at the museum would be terrified and subject to all manner of indignities, or worse.
There was little interest in the information I provided. I heard nothing more, but a week later the front doors of the building were torched by a loose collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous protesters who had declared themselves sovereign. Ultimately two men were convicted of arson and related offences.
After Wieambilla I contacted counter-terrorism police again in relation to a member of the amorphous sovereign citizen movement who had been making threats to several people online and who had openly stated that “Wieambilla is just the start”.
Before Wieambilla there had been investigative inertia. Now there was a buzz of activity.
But it would be too late for McCrow, Arnold, their traumatised colleagues and a good Samaritan who lay dead at Wieambilla.
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Queensland State Coroner Terry Ryan has released bodycam video of what is now known as the Wieambilla ambush on December 12, 2022. The chilling footage shows constables Rachel McCrow, Matthew Arnold, Randall Kirk and Keely Brough taking turns hurdling the fence at the property owned by Gareth and Stacey Train and making their way on foot towards the Trains’ home on a hot December afternoon.