Derek Williams was beside a grave in Yuendumu when he heard the news. He had just buried his uncle.
“A young fellow came rushing down and told us that Kumanjayi was shot,” Williams told the Northern Territory supreme court last month.
Williams is an Aboriginal community police officer and Kumanjayi Walker’s uncle.
Williams had arrested his 19-year-old nephew a few times and there had never been trouble; he said Walker usually agreed to go with him as he was family.
But on the night of 9 November 2019 an attempted arrest of Walker had gone horribly wrong. Walker had stabbed constable Zachary Rolfe, an officer from out of town, with scissors. Rolfe had then shot him three times.
While Williams was at his uncle’s grave, Walker had been sitting outside a Yuendumu property known as house 511. He was with Leanne Oldfield, the woman who adopted him as her son, and her husband Nathan Coulthard.
Walker was laughing at a family photo of his two small cousins and an aunt in a swimming pool. He then got up and walked through the only door into the house, Oldfield told the court.
Soon after, Oldfield said she saw police coming through the gate.
“They was walking really quickly [and] I seen the guns.”
Walker may not have seen the police approaching, but he knew they were coming. Twelve days earlier, he had left a residential alcohol treatment program in Alice Springs that he had been ordered by a court to attend as part of a suspended sentence. He had also removed an electronic monitoring device.
Three days before those police arrived, he had been at house 577 in Yuendumu with his girlfriend, Rickisha Robertson, when two local officers arrived. They wanted to arrest him for breaching his suspended sentence.
Walker rushed out of a bedroom with a small axe held high above his head, threatening the officers, before fleeing.
The officers gave chase, before returning to the house.
“Next time he does that, he might get shot,” one of the officers, senior constable first class Christopher Hand, told Lottie Robertson, Rickisha’s grandmother, when he returned.
“In Alice Springs … like, community policeman are different to town policeman.”
At 3pm the next day, in Alice Springs, Rolfe started his shift. He checked his emails, and noticed a report about the so-called axe incident in Yuendumu. Then he accessed body-worn camera footage taken from Hand and the other officer who had been there, Lanyon Smith.
Rolfe told the court that he thought the report about the incident bore little resemblance to the violence depicted in the videos.
Rolfe formed the opinion Walker was “extremely violent” and had the potential to use “lethal weapons” against police.
He thought Walker’s arrest was the sort of job that required the deployment of the Immediate Response Team (IRT), a semi-tactical unit made up of general duties police officers who received specialised training and could access weaponry including AR-15s and beanbag shotguns. Rolfe had been a member of the team for almost two years.
Later that day, Rolfe and other officers on the general duties roster decided to search a house in Warlpiri camp, Alice Springs, where Walker had been known to stay.
There did not appear to be anyone home, but one of Rolfe’s colleagues saw two young Aboriginal men running into scrub behind the property. Neither of them was Walker. Rolfe can be heard saying on his body-worn camera about one of the men: “fucking pussy cunt”.
In Yuendumu, local officers were trying to talk to Walker’s family and arrange his surrender. The local sergeant, Julie Frost, made a deal with Walker’s family that he would not be arrested until after the funeral of Williams’ uncle, but that when it was finished he had to hand himself in.
Some time after the axe incident but before the funeral, though Louanna Williams cannot remember the day, Walker, her nephew, visited her. She was cooking a kangaroo tail on the fire at house 548.
Williams gave evidence that Walker told her he was not responsible for a series of break-ins in Yuendumu. Frost had thought him a suspect, but had no proof.
Walker also said he never wanted to hurt anyone during the axe incident, but just wanted to escape the house, and told Williams he wanted to be arrested after the funeral “because he knew that he was in trouble”.
By this time, there were other concerns in Yuendumu, Frost told the court: the break-ins had led medical workers to evacuate Yuendumu, local officers had been deployed elsewhere, and there was unrest in a nearby remote community.
The influx of people for the funeral, which had been delayed until 9 November, could also complicate things, she reckoned. Frost had also decided that as she was in a relationship with Hand, neither of them, nor Smith, should be involved in the arrest of Walker, to avoid any possibility his treatment would be perceived as payback for the axe incident. And she was tired. So she sent a request for more coppers.
On the afternoon of 9 November, Rolfe received a phone call about half an hour before his shift was supposed to start from the acting sergeant of the IRT, Shane McCormack.
McCormack was in the process of rounding up people to deploy to Yuendumu, after Frost’s request had been approved.
He found four IRT officers, who met up at Alice Springs station. A dog handler would go with them too.
Some of those officers had not seen the axe incident, so Rolfe showed them on his computer. One of the officers, constable Adam Eberl, said Walker was lucky he hadn’t been shot.
They packed their swags and other gear, including camouflage uniforms, and set off through the desert to Yuendumu, about 300km away. Within minutes, they had no mobile phone reception, and the final part of their journey was on unpaved roads.
Rolfe arrived in Yuendumu with constable James Kirstenfeldt about 6.30pm, and introduced himself to Frost. The other officers were all in the station together within half an hour.
What was discussed during the roughly half hour that Rolfe was in the station is a matter of some dispute. But a few things are clear: the officers were told by Frost that police did not know where Walker was, that he could be arrested the following morning, but if they came across him that night they should lock him up.
Rolfe and the other officers left Yuendumu station at 7.06pm. They decided to head straight to house 577, the scene of the axe incident, to find out if Walker was there.
Ethan Robertson told Rolfe that Walker and Robertson’s daughter Rickisha had only left minutes earlier for either house 511 or 518.
The officers drive to houses 518 and 511, which are next to each other, on the other side of the Yuendumu football oval from house 577.
Rolfe speaks politely to people outside the houses, asking them to come closer so he can ask them questions about Walker.
“My name’s Zach, we’re new in town,” he says at one point. “We’re here to pick up [Kumanjayi] eh?”
When he is in the yard of house 511, Eberl says he notices a young man inside.
Seconds earlier, Walker had walked inside. He appears to be on his way back outside when Eberl, followed by Rolfe, step in.
Walker, his face illuminated by the torches of the officers, stares at them blankly from under a red New York Yankees cap.
He is asked his name, and says he’s Vernon Dixon, and points outside, saying “she’s my auntie”.
Rolfe ushers him to a wall of the house, not far from the door. He wants Walker to keep his hat off so he can identify him. Rolfe takes his phone from his pocket, finds a photo on it of Walker, and holds the phone up to his face.
After a quick comparison, Rolfe is convinced he has his man. He asks Walker to put his hands behind his back. But he has not noticed Walker’s right hand reaching into his pocket for a pair of scissors.
Walker launches at Rolfe. The pair struggle, with Rolfe stabbed on the top of the left shoulder as he uses that same arm to jab Walker.
Eberl and Walker start moving in the other direction from Rolfe, with Eberl, a much larger man with extensive martial arts training, attempting to use both arms to control Walker.
Rolfe fires his first shot, striking Walker in the back.
Walker and Eberl fall on a mattress on the ground and continue to struggle.
Rolfe heads towards them. Eberl is at least partially on top of Walker, but they are still moving. The scissors, and Walker’s right arm, which was holding them, cannot be seen on the camera footage.
Rolfe puts his left hand on Eberl’s lower back. He extends his right arm so that the barrel of his gun is within five centimetres of Walker. And he pulls the trigger twice more.
It had been less than an hour since he arrived in Yuendumu, 15 minutes from when he left the station.
By the time Derek Williams made his way from his uncle’s grave into town, Walker was dying on the floor of the Yuendumu police station. The second bullet fired by Rolfe had ripped through his spleen, a lung, his liver and a kidney. Outside the station, a crowd was gathering, angry and wanting answers about why the young Warlpiri man had been shot by police.
“People was yelling and screaming and wanted to throw rocks at the station, and yeah, I just calmed everybody down,” Williams told the court.
Four days later, Rolfe was charged with Walker’s murder.
Rolfe, 30, spent most of his five-week trial appearing utterly at ease. He would occasionally greet friends with a shaka when he entered the court. While waiting to enter the courtroom he would speak to his parents, Debbie and Richard, but more often to his friends, or the executive of the police unions that were a constant presence: the NT Police Association and Police Federation of Australia.
Rolfe was charged in relation to the second and third shots. The second was fired 2.6 seconds after the first, and the third 0.5 seconds later.
The trial was, at its core, a dispute about what occurred during those 3.1 seconds.
It was therefore not surprising that the body-worn camera footage of the shooting was played countless times in real time, slow-motion and frame-by-frame. In real time, the sound of the incident boomed through court room two of the NT supreme court.
As the prosecution and defence raked over it in detail, the more ambiguous it became, something of an optical illusion where two people looking at the same picture might see entirely different things. Watch the body-worn camera footage of Zachary Rolfe and what do you see? A police officer doing his job? Or a murderer?
What mattered most, however, was what Rolfe could see. As Judge John Burns said in his directions to the jury, “the important question may well turn out to be what was the perception, rather than the reality”.
Rolfe had said in his evidence he felt he had to pull the trigger the second and third time as he thought Walker was stabbing Eberl.
The prosecutor, Philip Strickland SC, believed the jury had enough reason to find Rolfe was lying about what he said he had seen. It was not shown on the camera footage. Rolfe told the court Walker put his hand on his police gun, but never told anyone that at the time. And Rolfe said “it’s all good, he was stabbing me, he was stabbing you” immediately after the incident, Strickland said, not to reassure Eberl, as claimed, but because he knew he had been “gung ho”, “gone too far” and wanted to “justify the unjustifiable”.
He also wanted to portray Rolfe, who spent five years in the army, applied to join the SAS, and paid for his own private security course in the US to “upskill” himself with weapons and tactical training prior to joining the NT police, as someone who sought out “direct action” jobs, such as the arrest of high-risk targets like Walker.
David Edwardson QC, Rolfe’s barrister, who, like his entire legal team, was paid for by the NT Police Association, dismissed these claims, and made clear to the jury that he believed Rolfe should not even be on trial.
“This case is tragic,” Edwardson said in his closing address.
“A young man lost his life, and a young courageous police officer has been charged with the most serious offence under the criminal justice system … without any proper investigation, and that is a disgrace.”
The jury, which did not include any Indigenous people, ultimately believed Rolfe’s account.
On Friday, almost exactly 24 hours after retiring to consider their verdict, the jury returned to a packed courtroom.
When the foreperson delivered the last of three not guilty verdicts, Rolfe stood alone in the dock for a moment, before he was swamped by supporters, to the point there was a line of people wanting to hug him or shake his hand.
“Obviously I think that was the right decision to make, but a lot of people are hurting today, Kumanjayi’s family and his community,” Rolfe said outside court.
“I’m going to leave this space for them.”
He was asked about whether he would stay in the force, and did not respond.
While the trial has finished, many matters remain unresolved.
Edwardson, in reference to issues that cannot be reported in a case that remains bound by many suppression orders, said that “consequences would flow” now that a verdict had been reached.
Strickland pointed towards a coronial inquest, expected to start later this year, as a way of exploring issues raised by the shooting that were not ventilated during the trial.
There was something else that could never be resolved by the trial, regardless of the outcome: the grief of Walker’s family, the Yuendumu community, and Aboriginal people wondering why they continue to die at the hands of police.
Those who were there for the verdict questioned why the jury contained no Aboriginal people, and why guns were still allowed in remote communities.
They mentioned the Aboriginal man, the same age as Walker, who was shot at six times by police in Palmerston, just south of Darwin, on Tuesday, and remains in a critical condition.
Ned Jampinjinpa Hargreaves, a Warlpiri elder, shouted outside court, before bursting into tears: “When are we going to get justice? When?”
