Zachary Rolfe trial: Kumanjayi Walker’s family told cops where to find him

Kumanjayi Walker attacked police with an axe three days before he was fatally shot by cop Zach Rolfe. Now the details of that axe attack can be revealed for the first time.

After a week of hunting high-risk arrest target Kumanjayi Walker, police got a tip-off from one of his relatives that he was hiding out at house 577 in the Yuendumu community: the home of his girlfriend’s grandparents.

Senior Constable Lanyon Smith got the tip from “a community source” just after 5pm on Wednesday November 6, 2019, while he and his partner were responding to a break-in at the home of the community’s medical clinic manager Luana Symonds.

When Smith and Senior Constable First Class Christopher Hand finished taking fingerprints from her jimmied kitchen window and seizing abandoned weapons from her yard, they drove the short distance to West Camp where Walker was apparently staying.

At 6.25pm it was still light when the bush cops pulled up outside house 577 where the 19-year-old’s partner Rickisha Robertson lived with her dad Ethan and grandparents Eddie and Lottie.

Rickisha had been Walker’s partner – and the victim of several serious bashings at his hands – since 2015.

Before the police arrived, the young couple had been arguing.

Walker knew police would be searching for him because he had breached parole when he escaped from the Central Australian Aboriginal Alcohol Programmes Unit in Alice Springs nine days earlier on October 29.

“I don’t wanna get locked up,” he told his girlfriend.

Rickisha, 19, was unsympathetic.

“Why did you run away from CAAAPU? They’ll shoot you,” she told him, according to an interview she later gave to police.

Smith and Hand, both 47, got out of their police vehicle and approached Ethan’s partner, Janice Burns, on the front porch.

NT Police body-cam footage showing Kumanjayi Walker threatening police with an axe the day before he was shot by police officer Zachary Rolfe.

She told them Walker was inside “with Rickisha in the middle room”.

Smith was familiar with the room, at the end of the hallway, having arrested Walker there twice before.

He activated his body-worn camera as he stepped through the front door and whispered to Ethan Robertson who was standing at the kitchen sink.

Wordlessly, Ethan pointed the cops to the bedroom.

Smith, taking the lead, approached the bedroom door and tried the handle but it was locked.

He knocked and heard a female voice inside. He knocked again and a few seconds later Rickisha swung the door open.

She later told detectives she was shocked to see police standing there because it meant someone had told them Walker was at her house.

Smith placed his baton in the door and pushed it further open.

“Where’s Arnold?”, Smith asked before seeing the teenager lying on the bed behind her.

Hand couldn’t see inside the room.

“So, I reached around, had a look, shone my torch and I could see a person who I now know is Arnold Walker,” he said.

“He was laying on a bed, had headphones in and he was looking at his mobile phone.”

Rickisha blocked the doorway, preventing the officers from entering the room and started saying “Window, window, window, window” to Walker.

“She’s got her hands across the door, not wanting us to go in, and in language she was telling Arnold to go out the window,” Hand said.

The room was completely dark, illuminated only by Hand’s torch, so Smith reached around to the familiar light switch and flicked it to no effect.

“Hop out of the way,” Hand told Rickisha.

In the darkness, Walker got up off the bed and came towards Smith, but Rickisha wouldn’t move.

“Window window window window window,” she kept saying.

Smith repeatedly told Walker to turn around so that Hand could handcuff him.

“Arnold, turn around, turn around now,” he said.

Walker refused, saying he wanted to talk to Lottie.

“After we handcuff you,” Hand countered.

“Turn around now.”

Walker then moved back towards the bed and reached down next to it.

“I thought he was putting the shirt on but he didn’t,” Rickisha said.

“He was grabbing that axe.”

Police again told Rickisha to move.

“Hop out of the way, out of the way, or you’ll get locked up as well,” Hand said before pulling her from the doorway.

She let out a loud moan “oh mum!” and ran into the living room.

Hand stepped in front of Smith and into the darkened bedroom.

“I remember there being some blankets on the ground and he was sort of rummaging around,” Hand said.

Next minute, Walker was moving towards him, holding an axe in a baseball stance.

Hand saw the tomahawk and thought ‘oh shit!’.

“He was real angry and my first thought was, ‘shit I gotta get outta here’,” Hand said.

“(Walker) came at me … pointing at me, shouting at me, I don’t remember what he said but I knew he was angry at me.

“I’m assuming … he thought we hurt his wife (because of) the noise she made.”

Walker was screaming, some of it inaudible, but some in perfect English.

“You wanna f..king get in my way hey?” Walker yells.

“Don’t f..king get in my way!”

Smith, now cornered at the end of the hallway, pushed Hand into the loungeroom – away from Walker – and put his hands up in front of his face.

“Hey, hey, we’re going, we’re going, we’re going, we’re going,” he screamed.

In a stroke of life-saving luck, Walker went past Smith and chased Hand into the living room.

“Don’t f---ing get in my way!” Walker yelled as he moved towards him with the hatchet above his head, ready to swing.

“I’m gonna get you!”

Hand was moving backwards towards the kitchen doorway.

He became “fixated” on the axe cocked back over Walker’s shoulder.

“I was standing sort of in the doorway, blocking his entrance out to the kitchen which would then lead him out to outside and he came right up close to me,” he said.

“Still holding the hatchet and he sort of, you know, cocked it back in his right hand ... as if he was gonna take a swing and he was, you know, yelling and screaming at me.”

Walker lowered the axe to his side and pushed Hand hard into the door frame.

“He was just pushing that man and pushing harder and … then he escaped,” Rickisha recounted to detectives.

“He ran in the bush because he don’t wanna go back to jail.”

Hand tried to grab Walker’s left arm but he broke free and ran from the house, jumped the fence and headed for the oval.

Hand chased him on foot while Smith ran to their police Toyota.

As Smith caught up with Walker near a toilet block, Walker struck the police vehicle with a tennis ball-sized rock.

Smith jumped out and joined the foot chase.

“He was turning around, back towards us saying, ‘I will shoot you’, referring to a rock he was holding in his hand,” Smith said.

Walker ran into the Men’s Area of the Community which offenders believe is a sacred area in which they can’t be arrested.

“I made that conscious decision to ... let him get out of the house and drop the hatchet, which he did, and try and chase him which was unsuccessful ‘cause he’s a 19-year-old reasonably fit man,” Hand said.

“I chased him for a few hundred metres, but ... I ran out of puff.”

Walker got away.

COPS LUCKY TO BE ALIVE

By the next day, news of the incident had reached Alice Springs.

Constable Xhenita Zendeli told detectives “it was a hot topic” at the town’s police station.

“Everyone was talking about it,” she said in her police interview.

“It was just people in the muster room talking, saying ‘oh shit’ you know, ‘saw that footage’, ‘he swung the axe at two officers, it was so close to their head’.

“The fact that he’s done that is scary, that’s all they were talking about.”

In the following days, countless police officers streamed the confronting footage on shared computers in the police muster room, in view of other colleagues.

Constable First Class Breanna Bonney watched the footage before heading out to search for Walker in Alice Springs.

“The idea behind us watching this footage was to give us an accurate understanding of the high-risk behaviour exhibited by Mr Walker towards police attempting to arrest him,” she told detectives.

“By watching this footage, I recall feeling physically nauseous from the fear that it caused me for the lives of my colleagues who were trying to arrest him.”

Constable Mitchell Hansen also watched the video after being tasked with finding the offender.

Hansen found the footage “very, very confronting”.

“When I saw him actually charging those officers, charging towards them from that confined area with the hatchet, with the tomahawk, I was like ‘oh shit’,” he told detectives.

“I wholeheartedly believed that those two members were about to get killed by Walker.

“I was pretty surprised at how it had gone down, surprised that the members didn’t appear to do anything.”

Detectives quizzed Hansen about the conversations that had taken place about the incident.

“We discussed what tactical options we would have (used) at the time,” he said.

“Given the level of danger … it would’ve been a hundred percent justifiable to shoot him.

“I don’t know if it was discussed but that’s definitely what I was thinking at the time.”

Alice Springs Acting Senior Sergeant Alistair Gall remembers the term “piss poor performance” being used when he first saw the footage in the Shift Sergeants’ office during a handover.

He said Alice Springs police thought it was “shoddy police work” on the part of the Yuendumu officers.

“The gist of the conversations were that the members that attended were very lucky that they weren’t assaulted or harmed in any way,” he told detectives.

“And also, that the way they managed the situation was poor.

“There was a fellow with an axe and they didn’t appropriately deploy their resources to contain him.”

Gall also viewed the footage again on at least two occasions in the muster room with his patrol group (PG).

“I guess one of my defining memories is, there was incredulity essentially at the way the Yuendumu members were operating,” he said.

“The train of thought around the PG was, you know, ‘what the hell were they doing?’

“These comments were aired when they were viewing the footage.”

AXE ATTACK AFTERMATH

After they caught their breath, Hand called Remote Sergeant Julie Frost – also his romantic partner of 10 years – and told her what had happened.

He and Smith then went back to house 577 to retrieve the tomahawk.

“And we said to (Lottie), ‘you know, he’s lucky we didn’t shoot him’,” Hand told detectives.

“We’re trying to tell her that ‘this was really, really serious and you know, you just can’t come at police with hatchets’.”

By this time, Frost had called herself on-duty and met the two members at the station.

“I think it was when I saw the footage of Lanyon’s that I realised how serious it was,” Frost told detectives.

The remote sergeant had dealt with Walker before.

“He’s a high-risk offender,” she said.

“Eddie and Lottie Robertson, who live at House 577, have previously harboured Arnold when we’ve gone to arrest him or when they know that we are looking for him.”

The three officers then drove back to the house and Frost approached Lottie who was sitting on a chair outside.

“Lottie, what has happened today is extremely serious and I’m here to talk to you and Eddie about it,” Frost recalled saying in her interview with police.

Lottie said her husband was still “chasing Arnold in the bush”.

Frost then reprimanded Rickisha for having obstructed her officers which had given Walker time to grab the axe.

Frost said she would put Rickisha “before the court” for what she’d done.

“Your actions could have got my members seriously hurt and it could’ve got Arnold killed,” she said.

At that moment an angry Eddie, a Traditional Owner, stormed up to the house.

“Why are you always chasing Arnold? You keep chasing Arnold,” he accused Frost.

Lottie stepped in and told Eddie what had actually happened, smoothing things over.

“You know, Arnold only had seven days left in CAAAPU to go and he would’ve been home and hosed,” Frost told them.

“He didn’t have to cut off his bracelet and now he’s made it so much worse for himself.

“(Walker) could’ve been shot because of his actions.”

Frost then told them that they had two hours to bring Walker into the station.

“If he’s not here at the Police Station within two hours I’m going to be pulling resources from town because this is very serious,” she told them.

Eddie said he would “try my hardest” to get him there “but we can’t make him”.

Frost went back to the station and put an alert on Walker’s name in the police system with ‘to be arrested’ in case he travelled back into Alice Springs.

“I also put an alert of ‘violence’ on him as well, basically to the effect that ‘if he knows he’s to be arrested, he will be hiding weapons and will have weapons, and will use weapons to escape’.”

The local police didn’t hear from the Robertsons before knocking off at 10:45pm.

Thursday morning Frost heard there was a funeral taking place the next day so she returned to house 577 and approached Eddie and Lottie who were sitting under a tree.

“Right, what’s gonna happen is this,” she told them.

“I’m going to allow Arnold the liberty to go to the funeral tomorrow without us trying to get him in the next day or so.

“As soon as that funeral is over, he needs to come to the Police Station and present himself.”

It was agreed that Eddie would text Senior Aboriginal Community Police Officer Derek Williams to inform police when Arnold was finished at the funeral so they could “come grab him”.

Frost contacted the Watch Commander, Superintendent Jody Nobbs, asking for extra resources from Alice Springs to make the arrest.

Walker was now also facing charges of Assault Police, Criminal Damage of Police Vehicle and Breach Suspended Sentence.

Nobbs told Frost to put together an “ops order” and he would secure the resources to apprehend Walker.

Walker did not interact with police again until November 9, 2019.

THE INVESTIGATION

By the time detectives investigating the November 9 shooting interviewed Smith and Hand about the axe attack, the pair seemed embarrassed.

“I felt like he’s gonna hit us, like he’s gonna assault us with (the axe),” Hand told detectives.

“Like that’s the immediate thought and that’s why I froze and thought ‘shit’.

“I was frightened.”

Similarly, Smith said he thought Walker “was gonna chop me”.

“Or I was gonna try, play passive and hope that he didn’t do anything but if he did, I was gonna attempt to grab the axe.”

Hand said the whole incident was “unexpected”.

“You’re not normally confronted with this sort of stuff,” he said.

“This escalated so quickly ... that I think it caught myself and Smith by surprise and hence we froze a bit.

“We were there for a warrant so we didn’t sort of formulate a plan because we didn’t know he was gonna be armed.”

Hand said that although police training dictated that he should have drawn his firearm when confronted with an edged weapon, he opted for “a bit of self preservation”.

“They train you in defensive tactics to, you know, (if) it’s an edged weapon ... you draw a firearm,” he said.

“But until that actually happens you don’t even think of anything like that.

“I didn’t even think of using a firearm because of my previous experience in Remote Communities, especially Yuendumu ... I wasn’t prepared to use it.”

Hand mentioned a range of reasons why he didn’t go for his glock including the confined space.

“(We) probably should’ve shot him or we had justification,” he said.

“Justified under the ‘Act’, the crim code, but ... it would’ve been putting our safety at jeopardy.

“The immediate consequences of even drawing your firearm in a remote community can be difficult to manage.

“I’d probably rather a knock to the arm or a broken arm rather than shooting him and then being potentially set upon by other family members while we’re trying to render First Aid or what have you.”

Despite criticism from his colleagues, Hand did not regret his response.

“I froze which I’m not proud of but it is what it is,” he said.

“I have heard that people have been critical, which doesn’t bother me.

“I’m comfortable with how I reacted and no one got hurt.

“I’d handle the situation the same way if it happened again.”

–

Watch our exclusive Zachary Rolfe interview and documentary — and read all our coverage — at theaustralian.com.au and the app

Hear all the news and analysis in our daily podcast Yuendumu: The Trial, available by searching ‘Yuendumu’ wherever you get your podcasts