Teen boy kept in horrific squalor before suicide, inquest told

Aboriginal teen Cleveland Dodd had been cruelly isolated in squalor for three months when he took his own life, an inquest into his tragic death has been told.

Cleveland Dodd and his mother Nadene, who wants justice for the way he was treated.

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Aboriginal teen Cleveland Dodd had been isolated in squalor for three months when he took his own life inside Western Australia’s failed experiment in juvenile justice – an annexed wing of a maximum security men’s prison where horrifying conditions had become acceptable to the guards as well as senior bureaucrats.

The coronial inquiry into the life and death of the 16-year-old Yamatji boy has been told that during the final 86 days of his life, Cleveland was allowed out of his cell for a total of four hours.

In a closing statement to the long-running inquest on Monday, Julian McMahon SC – representing the Aboriginal Legal Service – described Cleveland as a vulnerable boy subjected to a cruel regime of cold food, no running water and little human contact in the months before he inflicted fatal injuries on himself in the early hours of October 12, 2023.

“This was a truly deeply troubling series of events, an environment where people came to accept what should have been regarded as unacceptable – self harms, squalor, lockdowns and isolation,” Mr McMahon told the inquest.

At the time of Cleveland’s death, every boy in Unit 18 at Casuarina Prison was Aboriginal.

Like the other boys in neighbouring cells at Unit 18, Cleveland was served cold meals through a slit in the door of his cell and was forced to eat within metres of a ­toilet that did not flush because authorities had cut off water.

He sometimes went an entire day without a drink of water because there was no running water in the cells, and paper cups of tap water had to be delivered in a regimented process requiring two guards to open the cell door.

On Monday, Mr McMahon said CCTV of Cleveland receiving his final meal showed the lack of empathy with which the boys were treated.

“We saw in court the video of Cleveland being fed on the evening of the 11th (of October, 2023). That was horrific,” Mr McMahon told the inquest. “(They were) fast-moving adults in paramilitary-like gear and there was effectively no empathy and engagement with Cleveland as a young boy in need of company.

“None of us has been fed in that way … without real human engagement.”

The McGowan Labor government created Unit 18 for “challenging” boys in July 2022, a move encouraged by youth custodial officers employed to guard juveniles at the state’s only youth detention centre in Perth’s southeast. Their union had been applying pressure on the WA government to remove a particularly difficult cohort of boys from the youth facility – Banksia Hill – and put them somewhere more secure. The inquest has aired claims the highly punitive Unit 18 was necessary to deal with boys who were destructive and violent at Banksia Hill. It has also heard counter claims that chaos at Banksia Hill was a direct result of staff shortages, as evidenced by continued rioting at Banksia Hill after the so-called troublemakers were removed.

The Aboriginal Legal Service wrote 93 letters to the WA government in 18 months detailing how and why Unit 18 was not fit for purpose and especially unsafe for Cleveland, who had an intellectual disability and was among at least nine boys known to be suicidal.

“What was really happening (at Unit 18) was horrific and it shouldn’t be shied away from; there was an epidemic of self-harm amongst a cohort of Aboriginal children in state care,” Mr McMahon told the inquest.

Cleveland’s mother Nadene Dodd was in the public gallery but left visibly upset during Mr McMahon’s statements. Outside the inquest, she said the inhumanity of her son’s final days was too much.

“It was both barbarous and criminal. If people are not held to account then justice will have been denied,” she said.