Four fresh-faced officers went on a ‘routine’ job. Hours later, six people were dead

Assembling the regular intakes of motivated, young Queenslanders into effective frontline officers requires the study of “every day policing situations”, the academy’s promotional material says. Recruits tune their decision-making skills on the practical hypotheticals. They get fit. They learn tactical driving, field craft and how to use a gun.

For six months, Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold absorb the adventure and responsibility of what it is to be a cop.

Their respective graduations – McCrow in June last year; Arnold in March 2020 – fall in the time of COVID lockdowns, when conspiracy theorists and theories find voice and are made. In Victoria, protesters waving “I am not your experiment” placards and wearing $30 “freedom fighter” T-shirts turn marches into riots.

And watching the news from rural Queensland is Gareth Train, who by Monday night would be dead alongside his wife, brother, McCrow and Arnold – and implicated in the state’s worst loss of police officer life in living memory.

Train is an eloquent and practised peddler of nonsense on conspiracist websites since at least 2020. In one November post, Train informed his compatriots on the finer details of how the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, which led to gun reform, was a “government psychological operation”.

A September post called out the United Nations and World Health Organisation for planning to use “silent weapons” for the purposes of “distraction, submission, compliance”. The same month, he bragged about his 20-odd years of telling police to get off his property.

“Fortunately for me they have all been cowards,” he wrote.

“Our country is at a point where even cowards are now dangerous because they are unpredictable in groups, turn your back and you may find yourself out cold on the floor with law enforcement dancing on your head. We are seeing this in Victoria.”

Constables McCrow, 29, and Arnold, 26, along with their colleagues Keely Brough and Randall Kirk, were not cowards when they approached the secluded block Train owned with his wife Stacey on Monday afternoon.

They had been called to Wieambilla, on the Western Downs in Queensland, as a favour for NSW Police, to check about a missing person: 46-year-old Nathaniel Train, a former school principal who is Gareth Train’s younger brother.

From left: Constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, who were killed in the Wieambilla shooting, and constables Randall Kirk and Keely Brough, who survived the incident.

He had last been seen at Dubbo in December last year, but had kept in contact with family members. The alarm was raised when contact stopped on October 9.

McCrow and Arnold arrived at Wains Road from Tara, about 30 kilometres to the south; Brough and Kirk from Chinchilla, about 40 kilometres to the north. It was not known if the constables, all under 30, knew of Gareth Train’s dangerous rhetoric or hatred toward police, but someone decided it was best they approach as a team of four. Queensland Police Union president Ian Leavers, who has offered the most comprehensive version of what happened next, said the process was routine and there was no intelligence to suggest an “ambush”.

The constables had little cover as they approached the small and dumpy weatherboard house, which is raised on metre-high stilts in a clearing at the end of a driveway several hundred metres long. It was about 4.30pm.

From somewhere and someone, McCrow and Arnold were sprayed with gunfire from what Leavers believed to be high-powered shotguns, immediately dropping the wounded or dead constables to the ground. Kirk was also wounded, but he escaped into the scrub to desperately conjure back-up. Brough did the same. But there was nothing they could do for McCrow and Arnold.

“These ruthless, murderous people then went and executed the two police who were on the ground,” Leavers told Sky News. “They were executed in cold blood.”

Brough, only eight weeks graduated, took cover in the long grass as bullets whizzed into the surrounding soil and air. She texted goodbyes to her family. Then, Leavers said, the killer or killers set fire to the grass in an apparent attempt to force her into the gun-barrel sights.

“She didn’t know if she was going to be shot or burned alive,” he said. Somehow, she made it out alive.

While the precise timeline was unclear, it was believed neighbour Alan Dare, 58, saw the smoke coming from the Trains’ property and went to investigate. He, too, was shot dead.

“That neighbour, like my officers, didn’t stand a chance,” Queensland Police Service commissioner Katarina Carroll said from Chinchilla on Tuesday. A local sergeant, accompanied by 15 other officers, risked their own lives to retrieve the bodies.

The siege on Wains Road lasted until about 10.30pm on Monday, when tactical officers shot and killed the last of the three occupants: Gareth Train, 47, Nathaniel Train, 46, and Stacey Train, 45. While Gareth’s online writings reveal a paranoid and radicalised conspiracist, those who knew the younger Train brother were shocked the former school principal could be implicated in such a crime.

He was highly regarded for his work in the Cairns region and, more recently, at Walgett in remote NSW. Newspapers had even quoted him about teaching at-risk young people.

He left the troubled Walgett Community College Primary School in August last year after suffering a heart attack so severe he had to be revived by colleagues. People who knew him said his mental health deteriorated and he became bitter about how the school was being run.

Former Walgett Community College Primary principal Nathaniel Train in December 2020.

He enlisted NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham, the former leader of the federal Labor Party, to ask questions of department officials.

One person who saw some of the 16 complaint emails Train sent to the department described them “quite out there”. It was not known when he joined his brother and sister-in-law, also an educator, in Queensland.

According to news reports from 2004, Stacey Train’s teaching journey began in Charters Towers. She is tracked in various complimentary articles through the following years as working as head of secondary schooling at Herberton State School, about 18 kilometres south-west of Atherton in far north Queensland, and a principal at Proston State School, about a 90-minute drive from Chinchilla.

It is believed she shared similar views to her husband Gareth and quit the profession rather than get vaccinated, but the story of how the trio became so bitter and twisted to the point of murder could take months or years to unpick, if at all.

On Tuesday, flags were drawn to half-mast at all Queensland police stations for the young officers taken before their 30th birthdays only two weeks from Christmas. Brisbane’s Story Bridge was bathed in blue.

With Jordan Baker, Ashleigh McMillan, Cloe Read and Matt Dennien

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