Brandishing a list of every police officer who had contact with her granddaughter Ms Dhu in the 48 hours before her death, Carol Roe told a rally outside Perth magistrates court that her family would get justice.
“They got to answer to us, to the Lord, to everybody,” Roe said.
Dhu, a 22-year-old Yamatji woman whose name is not used for cultural reasons, died at the hospital in Port Hedland on 4 August 2014, about 43 hours after being placed in the lockup at South Hedland police station for $3,622 in unpaid fines.
The inquest, which began in November and has run for a total of four weeks, has heard from 17 police officers based at that police station who had custody of, or interacted with, Dhu.
On Wednesday the last of those police officers, former sergeant Rick Bond, gave evidence in an overcrowded fifth-floor courtroom.
“They all say, ‘I can’t recall, I can’t recall,’” Roe told the rally outside court on Wednesday. Dhu’s mother, Della Roe, also addressed the rally.
“They said she was faking it – how can you fake dying?” she said. “She wasn’t exaggerating, the poor girl was dying.”
Bond, who has since left the police force, told the inquest he believed Dhu’s symptoms were linked to drug withdrawal and that up until 12.14pm on the day she died, he had no information to suggest her illness could be something other than drug withdrawal and a sore rib.
Had he had that information – including evidence that she had moaned and cried through the night, fallen down when she had tried to sit up, been dropped by a police officer and hit her head, and repeatedly vomited – “things would have been different”.
Instead, he said, he believed a report of her vomiting on the morning of her death was consistent with drug withdrawal. He denied he thought she was “faking it,” despite several other police officers giving evidence that they heard him say as much, and denied that he maintained that belief up until the point he was told she had gone into cardiac arrest at the hospital.
But he did agree with a finding by Western Australia police internal affairs that his assertion that Dhu was “exaggerating” her symptoms because of drug withdrawal did influence the behaviour of other officers.
“I didn’t think she was faking it, I didn’t know that it was that serious, I wasn’t aware,” he said.
Asked if he thought his treatment of Dhu was inhumane, Bond replied: “I wouldn’t say inhumane, I would say unprofessional.”
He denied he called Dhu a junkie “to her face”, but not that he called her a junkie to another officer, and conceded that he might have sworn at her in his last interaction with her before she died because swearing “was the norm” in the Pilbara.
Peter Quinlan, counsel for Carol and Della Roe, told the court that one of the fines Dhu had been unable to pay, and for which she was arrested on a warrant of commitment, was disorderly behaviour involving swearing.
Bond said he was not aware of that at the time.
Asked why he had a reputation among other police officers at South Hedland as being “aggressive” and difficult to approach, Bond said it was because he had “high standards”.
However he said he should have taken more steps to record information about Dhu’s health and behaviour in the cells.
The inquest will conclude with evidence from assistant police commissioner Duane Bell on Thursday.
