Twenty-four years ago, Yvonne Hayes got the call every parent fears.
It was 2am and her son, Brad Edwards, was fighting for life in hospital.
The previous night, on 6 November 1999, Edwards had set off for his family’s property in Gympie to feed the animals.
A kangaroo had collided with his car a month before so he was riding his push bike.
It was a dark, wet Saturday night, with a new moon in the sky, when the 21-year-old was hit by an allegedly stolen brown Holden Gemini at about 11.30pm.
The car sped off, leaving Edwards crumpled on the roadside, clinging for life with serious head injuries. He died in hospital two days later. If Edwards was still alive today, he would have turned 45 in April.
“I just wonder what he would have done with this life: get married, have children?” Hayes told Guardian Australia.
In the two decades since her son’s death, Hayes has been through eight days of coroner’s hearings without receiving a definitive answer about how he died.
Previous hearings in 2002 and 2019 failed to identify who was driving the car that killed Edwards.
In Brisbane last week, the deputy state coroner, Stephanie Gallagher, reopened the inquest for the first time under new Queensland laws that allow coroners to direct witnesses to answer questions. The laws have been in place since 2003, but only in 2020 were they amended to apply retrospectively to earlier cases.
Under the new laws, the coroner can direct witnesses to answer questions but these responses cannot be used against them as evidence for a criminal charge.
Hayes, 70, hopes the reopening of the inquest under these new conditions will finally reveal what happened.
“I only want the truth. And basically, that’s when I will stop,” she said.
Hayes was among those in court as the inquest reopened.
Det Sgt Ben Rose, who has been investigating the case since 2019, told the inquest there were several men who were drinking at a house near Gympie and had been identified as possible passengers or drivers of the stolen vehicle that hit Edwards.
They included three living men and two others who have since died.
One of the five men was Terry Ronan, whose former partner Aleisha Laidlaw took the stand at the inquest last week. She told the inquest that a year or two after the 2002 hearings, Ronan had told her about a crash he was involved in.
The counsel assisting, Joe Crawford, asked Laidlaw if Ronan had said to her: “We were fucking cruising on that road that night and fucking hit something and we were like, ‘fuck’ … There was a loud bang … We probably hit that fella.”
Laidlaw agreed words along those lines had been used and said she had reacted angrily, which she said had led Ronan to backtrack and say they had probably hit an animal.
Taking the stand later that day, Ronan denied being in the car that hit Edwards, or being involved in any way.
He told the court he did not agree with Laidlaw’s version of events.
“I don’t remember having no convo with Aleisha,” Ronan said.
He denied that his consumption of drugs and alcohol could have affected his recollection of the conversation.
Ronan said he had “shot up” (injected) a man in the forehead with speed in his grandma’s house on the night Edwards died. The inquest heard that man was Ricky Millar, another of the five men identified, who is now deceased.
Ronan said he was later picked up at a service station by the same man who admitted he had hit a man with his car. But Ronan said he could not remember when that occurred, only that the man had taken him to Yandina to buy drugs.
“I don’t know who stole the car,” he said “I don’t even know what colour the car was, mate, that’s the information I was given by police.”
No further inquest hearings are scheduled.
Hayes says her memories of her son have never faded.
“He was my third child,” she told Guardian Australia. “He was a glazier who was well liked.
“He was a character; he liked to play tricks. It’s a total loss of a good person.”
