It was about 10.30am on Tuesday when 10 police visited a property in Victoria’s high country, just outside Porepunkah, to execute a search warrant.
The property contained a house and adjoining bus, and was dotted with chestnut trees. Behind it was thick bush, and Mount Buffalo loomed overhead.
As the officers made their way up the drive, they were being watched. Soon, they were fired upon.
Two of them were killed, a third was injured, and the man allegedly responsible was fleeing through bush he had known for decades.
That man is Dezi Freeman, born Desmond Filby, a “sovereign citizen” with a self-confessed hatred of police. Freeman liked to think of himself as an outlaw, fighting against the tyranny of government, and now he is on the run in bushranger country.
The Victorian chief commissioner, Mike Bush, said in a press conference late Tuesday that his officers, a 59-year-old detective and a 35-year-old senior constable, were “murdered in cold blood”. Another detective has undergone surgery, but his injuries are not life threatening.
Freeman allegedly ran into the bush, heavily armed, alone.
It was all over in minutes, and yet there is no telling how long the pain and possible recriminations will linger.
The seven other officers involved in executing the warrant pursued him, and then stayed on the property for several hours more while it was secured, Bush said.
It is unclear whether police fired their weapons or if Freeman has the weapons of the officers who were killed, but Bush confirmed the fugitive had several firearms.
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The fugitive was known to police, and a risk assessment was carried out before the warrant was executed, he said.
Bush was unable to say whether police had changed their process for executing such warrants since two Queensland police officers were ambushed and killed by conspiracy theorists in a shootout at Wieambilla in December 2022.
Nor could Bush say why that assessment did not recommend the inclusion of specialist squads such as the Special Operations Group, or other scenarios, such as arresting the fugitive away from the property.
But he did say the involvement of 10 officers suggested police had given some consideration to the risk posed by the man who lived on the property.
This risk assessment would have considered the likelihood of Freeman being armed. It is unclear if he was a registered firearms owner, but given his interactions with police this is unlikely: Freeman told a court last year that the force had cancelled his firearms licence.
The guns he used in the attack were described as powerful long-arms, which could include rifles or shotguns.
Freeman had a long history of public pronouncements about his beliefs, including inside and outside court.
On social media, he shared a film poster for the 1970s made-for-television Western, I Will Fight No More Forever.
He also shared a photo, which he said he had taken over the Kiewa Valley, to the south-east, about two decades earlier, that he claimed had once been used in tourism brochures in the area.
Like many others, Freeman appeared to become radicalised during the pandemic, and railed against the restrictions imposed by governments, which were seen as reinforcing his conspiratorial beliefs.
The AFP, in a briefing released under freedom of information laws in 2023, elaborated on the threat posed by sovereign citizens.
“What we’ve learned is while these groups present and behave very differently to other extremist groups, there is an underlying capacity to inspire violence,” Stephen Dametto, the acting assistant commissioner of counter terrorism and special investigations, wrote in the presentation.
“As COVID-based restrictions and mandates begin dissipating around the country, time will tell whether we see these movements fade into obscurity or whether they become a more enduring fixture of the threat landscape in Australia.”
Dametto added that “SovCits see violence as a last resort or only necessary in the form of ‘self-defence’ against a tyrannical government”.
Bush said there was no reason to believe the suspect had left the area, and that every available officer had been deployed in the manhunt. Almost a decade ago, the force used similar resources in the same region while hunting armed fugitives Mark and Gino Stocco, who had also shot at police.
Like that pair, Freeman is also said to know “bushcraft” well. He will need to: heavy rain, damaging winds, and snow above 1000 metres are forecast for the region on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Bush spoke from the police station in Wangaratta, the home town of the former premier Daniel Andrews, whom Freeman, along with many sovereign citizens, had a particular disdain for.
Wayne Gatt, the Police Association Victoria secretary, who joined Bush in the town, said that “a shocking and eerie feeling of dread” would have filled every police station in the state. The fear that existed in the back of every officer’s mind, the fear of paying the “ultimate price”, had been thrust into an awful reality.
Police had not been able to find Freeman’s wife and two children, who also lived at the property and were originally thought to have possibly been with him, for several hours, but the family went to a police station late on Tuesday.
“There is nothing to suggest they were ever in the company of the suspect following today’s incident,” police said in a statement.
Bush, who only started in the job two months ago, urged the man on the run to bring a peaceful end to the carnage.
“My message to that person is give yourself up so that the community can be at peace, and we can have this matter resolved peacefully.”
