NT police ‘sly and sneaky’ the night Kumanjayi Walker was shot, inquest told

Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin says police refused to inform his family about his condition after he was shot during an arrest at Yuendumu.

Constable Zachary Rolfe was acquitted of the shooting murder of Kumanjayi Walker in November 2019.

Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin has accused Northern Territory police officers of being “sly and sneaky” on the night Walker was fatally shot during an arrest at Yuendumu.

Samara Fernandez-Brown has told day three of the coronial inquest into the 19-year-old’s death of her frustration at the lack of communication from police inside the station after he was shot.

The Adelaide woman, who was attending a funeral at the remote outback community on November 9, 2019, said police refused to provide Walker’s family with information about his condition or what had happened during his arrest.

The three-month inquest, being held in Alice Springs, comes just months after Constable Zachary Rolfe was acquitted of Walker’s murder.

Samara Fernandez-Brown, the cousin of Kumanjayi Walker, outside the Alice Springs Local Court. Picture: Jason Walls

Constable Rolfe had been one of four Immediate Response Team members deployed from Alice Springs to Yuendumu to execute an arrest warrant for Walker on four charges including assaulting police with an axe and breaching his suspended sentence.

During the arrest, the young cop shot Walker three times after the teenager stabbed him with a pair of scissors.

In March a jury found Rolfe not guilty of all charges related to Walker’s death.

Ms Fernandez-Brown, whose mother is from Yuendumu, today told the coroner that she had seen Walker two days before the shooting – on Thursday November 7 – but that they had not spoken.

“We hadn’t seen each other for a long period,” she said.

“I’m also cousins with Rickisha, his partner, so I just spent some time speaking to her.

“It’s not uncommon for there to be shyness between both genders because when there’s a period when someone goes through culture or like men’s business or something, there is a little bit of a difference in the relationship that you can have culturally.”

But the 25-year-old, who has relocated from Adelaide to Yuendumu since the shooting, described her cousin as “nice to be around”.

“He was quite quiet in his composure but very enjoyable to be around, funny and he always had quite a calm presence,” she said.

NT Police body-cam footage showing Kumanjayi Walker with an axe the day before he was shot.

“Me growing up down south and him growing up between both states, it was harder to stay in contact so if there was a change (in his demeanour), it wasn’t one I could identify clearly.”

During questioning by counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer, Ms Fernandez-Brown said she was returning from her uncle’s funeral at the cemetery on the evening of November 9 when she saw “all of the ladies crying on the floor at the yellow house”.

“There was such an intensity of emotions,” she recalled.

“We pulled over in front of the house to then inquire about what was happening.

“At that point my family had assumed that Kumanjayi had died so they were saying that.

“It just seemed impossible. Impossible. Like, for me, I was like, ‘there’s no way that that could have happened. Not here’.”

Community members then walked to the “red house” where Walker had been shot because, Ms Fernandez-Brown told the court, she “needed proof”.

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

“I didn’t go inside the house. A lot of the men (went inside) and the women, we sort of stayed outside when they did that.

Kumanjayi Walker.

“But I looked around and could see sort of those line marks in the ground, which were drag marks.”

Ms Fernandez-Brown agreed with Ms Dwyer that there had been no attempt, at that time, to preserve the crime scene.

Community members then drove to the police station where they sought information about Walker’s condition.

“There’s a kind of like a doorbell that has a speaker as well from inside or goes to Darwin and so we’re trying that a number of times to try to communicate and to try to get some answers,” she said.

“But we got nothing.

“The only thing I was really thinking about is answers.

“It was just ‘I need to get a full picture of what’s happening before I can proceed with anything else’.”

During questioning by Ms Dwyer, the young woman said she felt “anxious” and “very scared” that night.

Multiple videos Ms Fernandez-Brown had filmed and shared on social media, of the congregation outside the police station, were played to the court.

“It was such a hard decision to make because everybody was so emotional and I am quite a private person and I’ve never gone on live on Facebook before,” she said.

“But there was a lot of people around me, family members, saying ‘we need to go on live or we need to record this’.

“My rationale around doing it was ‘if we don’t, nobody’s gonna believe this. Nobody’s going to believe that we would come outside of the police station, asking for answers’.

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

One of the videos Ms Fernandez-Brown filmed was of two police cars and an ambulance leaving the police compound and heading towards the airstrip late that night.

In the video, Ms Fernandez-Brown can be heard yelling and calling police “sly”.

“It was because when the vehicles had left (the station) they didn’t have lights on when they were travelling, and they were going at such a fast speed out of the back of the police station,” she said.

“And again, there was no communication with any family or community members.

“And because of that it felt very sly and sneaky that there wasn’t any transparency with us.”

It wasn’t until 7am the next morning that some of Walker’s extended family discovered he had died.

Ms Fernandez-Brown said she was “devastated” to discover that Walker’s body had been taken to Alice Springs by road that morning and that he had not been airlifted to hospital

The previous night.

“It was my genuine belief that he may have been in critical condition but he was still alive,” she said.

“I was naturally very devastated.

“It just felt again, very, very disrespectful to me and to the family and to Kumanjayi.”

The hearing before Coroner Elisabeth Armitage continues.