Inquest hears of when two worlds collided

Never had the roles of law enforcer and respected elder collided like on the night Derek Williams’ colleagues fatally shot his nephew Kumanjayi Walker.

Derek Williams. Picture: Amanda Parkinson

For almost two decades, Derek Williams has “worked between two worlds” as a police officer in the remote outback community where he’d grown up, but never had the roles of law enforcer and respected elder collided as on the night his colleagues fatally shot his nephew Kumanjayi Walker.

The coronial inquest into Walker’s death on Wednesday heard that Mr Williams, a senior Aboriginal community police officer, had been attending a funeral on November 9, 2019, when an Immediate Response Team from Alice Springs arrived in town to arrest his nephew.

By the time the funeral had finished and Mr Williams was covering his uncle’s grave with sand, Walker had been shot three times by Constable Zachary Rolfe after he had stabbed the policeman with scissors.

Within an hour, Mr Williams was posted outside the Yuendumu police station acting as the sole liaison between an angry mob and colleagues locked inside trying to keep Walker alive.

That night, Mr Williams – who was kept in the dark about Walker’s death – worked hard to keep the community calm while communicating with the police inside via text message.

On Wednesday he told the inquest into the 19-year-old’s death that he had seen Walker as a baby but didn’t properly meet him until his nephew was about 10. “He was really shy and he didn’t speak much. You just got a – just one word or two words because he was really slow to react to conversations,” he said.

Mr Williams, 38, said he spent his early years on a bush station before his family moved to Yuendumu in the 1990s. He went to boarding school in Darwin before trying a range of jobs and training as an ACPO in 2006. He worked in different communities before being posted to Yuendumu.

“It’s really … eye opening, especially working between two worlds … the community and your culture with the family, and working with the police … it’s challenging at times,” he said.

The inquest heard Mr Williams had arrested Walker four or five times before. “I always attend at his house and just tell him to jump in the front and not in the back in the cage, just to make him feel comfortable,” he said.

“Because he was really slow to react to words and … if they’re in a confined area, they get really anxious. They need to be treated with respect and people with that disorder, they need to be … talked to properly, not improperly.”

Mr Williams in an earlier statement said he did not think there was any urgency to arrest Walker before the funeral because he did not think he posed an immediate danger to anyone in the community.

“You can’t just go into people’s yard when they’re mourning a loss or attending funerals,” he told the inquest.

“We’re all human beings and just need to respect each other.”