A man convicted of killing his partner’s 10-month-old son has died in custody at Casuarina prison, south of Perth, in the third suicide of an Aboriginal prisoner at the maximum security facility in the three years since it was scheduled to finish a $5m program to minimise ligature points.
According to the West Australian, Mervyn Kenneth Douglass Bell, 28, was found dead in the shower of his locked cell about midday on Tuesday. A police spokesman told PerthNow that Bell’s death was reported to police about 12.30pm and he was believed to have taken his own life.
The WA department of corrective services has confirmed his death, but not the exact circumstances, saying they would be questions for coronial investigation. Guardian Australia has contacted WA police for comment.
Bell was serving a 27-year sentence for raping, bashing and murdering 10-month old Charlie Mullaley during a 15-hour drive throughout the Kimberley, after taking him from his mother, Bell’s former partner, Tamica Mullaney, on the streets of Broome, a coastal town in north-western Australia. He was also serving a five-year sentence for assaulting Mullaney on the night he took her son, leaving her naked and bleeding on the street.
Supreme Court judge John McKechnie, who presided over the trial, described Bell’s crime in his sentencing remarks, last December, as one of the worst he had ever seen, saying: “About once every 10 years there’s a crime so evil that it shocks the public.”
The Corrective Services Commissioner, James McMahon, expressed his condolences over Bell’s death on Tuesday, but he was the only one to do so. Mullaney, speaking to the West Australian, said: “I just wish he had suffered like my son did.”
Marc Newhouse, from the Death in Custody Action Watch Committee of WA, said Bell’s crimes were “irrelevant” when discussing his death.
“With a case like this there’s not going to be a lot of community outrage or concern about it, but there ought to be because every death in custody is something that, from our perspective, should not be happening,” Newhouse said.
“Regardless of what a person is doing time for, people don’t get stripped of their human rights simply by being incarcerated.”
Bell’s death was the third of an Aboriginal man at the prison since 2013. On 6 March 2013, 20-year-old Jayden Stafford Bennell was found hanged in a communal area in his unit at Casuarina; and on 22 October 2014, the day before the Western Australian premier, Colin Barnett, promised to review WA’s incarceration of Aboriginal people in response to the death of 22-year-old Yamatji woman Julieka Dhu, 31-year-old Aubrey Wallam committed suicide in his cell, also reportedly by hanging.
Dhu’s death was not suicide – she had reported stomach pain and been taken twice to hospital before dying on the floor of a cell in the police lock-up in Port Hedland, 1500km north of Perth. The inquest into her death was fast-tracked, due to public pressure and a promise Barnett made her family, and will be held in Port Hedland in November.
The families of both Bennell and Wallam are still waiting to be assigned an inquest date.
All three recent Aboriginal deaths at Casuarina occurred after it advertised a two-year, $5m construction project to reduce the number of hanging points in the prison, as part of the department’s Ligature Minimisation Program. The work was put to tender in late 2009 and was supposed to be completed by 2012. A matching contract was advertised for WA’s Hakea Remand Prison a few months later.
The statewide program began in 2009, on the recommendations of the coroner following the suicide of Simon John Loveless at Roebourne Regional Prison in 2007.
The department’s 2012-13 annual report said the “current phase” of the program was scheduled to be completed that financial year, but in 2014, another coroner’s report, this time relating to a suicide in Hakea Remand Centre in 2010, noted that, while ligature minimisation programs work had been completed in the “safe” cells used for prisoners about whom there are mental health concerns, “due to limited funding, similar works in unsecure cells have not been prioritised”.
According to this year’s WA budget papers, the department intends to spend $3.1m on the continuation of the ligature minimisation program over the next four years, starting in 2015-16.
Bell’s name has now been added to the list of Aboriginal people who have died in custody in WA since 2012, bringing the number awaiting inquest to five. The family of the first name on that list – Maureen Mandijarra – has been waiting since 30 November 2012.
Bell had maintained his innocence leading up to his death and was reportedly planning to appeal his sentence. He had claimed at trial that baby Charlie had caused some of his injuries – which included a broken arm and leg, third-degree burns, and severe genital bruising – by falling from a car seat and on rocks, a claim McKechnie dismissed as a lie.
“It is not possible for the deceased to have injured himself,” McKechnie, according to a report from the time from PerthNow. “He was not yet able to walk.”
Last month, Malcolm Yarran and Lawrence Watt, who were imprisoned with Bell at Albany Regional Prison when he was awaiting trial last year, were found not guilty of bashing him with a hammer while he was sitting down playing cards.
The department of corrective services has been contacted for comment.
