The family of a young Aboriginal man who died in jail after two years on remand has called for independent investigations into Aboriginal deaths in custody, in order to end the “monstrous loophole” where police and corrections “investigate their own”.
“I’ve been through this prison system, the system that killed our boy, the system that needs to change,” Colin Chatfield said outside the New South Wales coroner’s court on the final day of the inquest into his 22-year-old son’s death in prison in 2017.
“We want independent investigations into all black deaths in custody and the law to be changed, to close this monstrous loophole where they investigate their own.”
Tane Chatfield had been on remand for two years at Tamworth correctional centre when he was found hanging in his cell in 2017. His mother, Nioka Chatfield, said it took authorities five hours to notify the family that he was in hospital.
“When we got there … we found our beautiful son Tane connected to a life support machine,” she said. “He was lying there fully naked, only a pair of hospital socks on. We still don’t know what happened to his clothes.
“It had taken five hours after Tane was hospitalised for them to call us. The staff at the hospital had no answers for us about what had happened to Tane. Corrective service officers sat at his door while we cried. We sat and wondered if our boy was going to live or die. Hospital staff told our other children that ‘your brother’s brain is dying’. He never woke up.”
The Chatfields said an independent body should be set up to carry out the immediate investigation into any death in custody and Aboriginal people must be centrally involved.
“Our son was not born to get a death sentence from the corrective services system or the justice health system,” Nioka Chatfield said. “Tane has left a paper trail that has been examined all week, a paper trail so strangers can tell me about my boy. But that paper trail doesn’t give any insight into Tane’s beautiful personality. It doesn’t give any insight into the struggle of a young man on remand for two years who fought for his innocence.”
Nioka Chatfield said the family had been unable to move on from their confusion and grief in the years it had taken for the inquest to occur.
“Waiting three years with no answers has taken a huge toll on our family,” she said. “With grieving, you are supposed to have a process of acceptance and moving forward. But without answers we have been stuck. We ask all of you here today – why has it taken three years for us to start to get the information we need about what happened to Tane?”
Earlier this week, the court heard that Chatfield may have had multiple seizures and was distressed to be separated from his cellmate on his last night in remand.
Darren Cutmore, Chatfield’s cellmate in the preceding days, told the deputy state coroner, Harriet Grahame, that Chatfield was on the way back to Tamworth from court “happy as can be”, confident of being acquitted.
But Cutmore, who considered himself an “older brother” to the 22-year-old, could still remember his reaction when he realised the pair were to be separated later that night.
“He was very upset ... he said ‘all we’ve got is each other and now they’ve fucking taken that away from us too’,” Cutmore told the inquest on Monday.
One of the officers at Tamworth correctional centre that day, David Mezanaric, told the inquest he knew of the victim having two seizures on 19 September – one in his cell and one in a treatment room before paramedics arrived.
NSW Corrective Services at the time said Chatfield’s death was not suspicious, telling his family he took his own life.
