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No charges for rock-thrower who hit Yuendumu nurse after Zachary Rolfe shot Kumanjayi Walker
An ambulance arrives at Yuendumu Police Station on the night Kumanjayi Walker was shot dead by NT Police constable Zachary Rolfe.
- EXCLUSIVE
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
- 9:00PM MARCH 15, 2022
A Yuendumu man who confessed to police that he was “shooting rocks” at an ambulance on the night Kumanjayi Walker died was not charged over the incident despite the nurse driving being hit in the head with a large rock.
Rocks pelted police vehicles as they sped through Yuendumu to get back from the tiny airstrip on its outskirts to the police station on the other side of the community.
They were carrying six more police officers – reinforcements from Alice Springs – but knew they did not have enough members to defend the station if a riot erupted.
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They would have to manage until the Territory Response Group – en route from Darwin – touched down.
It was now 11pm on November 9, 2019.
When they’d convoyed out the back gate 10 minutes earlier, the police station was surrounded by locals.
The medical clinic was reportedly on fire and the cops needed to get back fast, before their compound was breached or burned to the ground with the deceased man – Kumanjayi Walker – inside.
Following behind the police vehicles was an ambulance with the two Remote Area Nurses from the nearby community of Yuelamu, desperately trying to keep up.
Lorraine Walcott, 64, was driving and her colleague Heather Zanker, 75, was in the passenger seat.
Adelaide-based Ms Zanker – an emergency nurse for more than 50 years – had worked in remote communities for decades but she’d only been at Yuelamu for six days.
Walcott had worked there for just eight weeks.
Police had requested the nurses accompany them out to the airstrip.
“They asked us to go to the airport to make it look like we were going out there to pick the doctor up … which is fair enough,” Ms Zanker told a police interviewer the next day.
“We listened to the police. They told us that one of them would travel in front and one would travel behind.
“I felt quite assured about that, it was pretty straight forward.”
But the two police vehicles, which were supposed to sandwich the ambulance in the convoy, had both taken off in front.
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The nurses, up high in their cumbersome Toyota LandCruiser troop carrier, were struggling to keep pace on the dark and unfamiliar streets.
When rocks started pummelling the police vehicles, the police accelerated and a gap opened between the second police 4WD and the ambulance.
“I saw the crowd of people coming towards the ambulance, getting closer and closer in front and to the sides of the ambulance,” Ms Walcott told a detective investigating the matter the following day.
“All of a sudden, I felt an explosion on my right, the right side of my head.
“It felt like a brick had hit me.
“I could feel drips coming from, blood dripping from somewhere.”
The driver-side window had been smashed and completely fallen away.
“They just came out of nowhere,” Ms Walcott said.
“There seemed to be a bright light, I don’t know if it was my car reflection on the police cars in front, but they were all illuminated.
“I just remember, trying to drive really quickly through them because they were all around us.
“I was worried I was gonna’ hit someone.”
The rocks kept coming. Ms Zanker ducked as the passenger-side window and the front windscreen shattered.
“The rock smashed the whole window altogether, and she (Ms Walcott) was starting to slow down,” Ms Zanker said.
“I said to her ‘you must keep going more quickly’ so that we could keep up with the police, ‘we don’t want to get behind’, and she was having a bit of trouble with that because she … was injured.
“I said, ‘well just keep going, you gotta keep going, you mustn’t stop!’”
With blood dripping down her face, Ms Walcott tried to stay on the road.
“I was trying to duck as I was weaving in and out of the people,” Ms Walcott said.
“I just remember thinking, ‘I’ve gotta get through this’.
“There was [sic] a lot of people and it reminded me of when you see a movie, when you see the zombies are coming for you.
“It was quite frightening, the whole incident.”
Walcott got the two nurses back to the police station, bloodied and shaken.
When Ms Zanker walked around and opened the driver-side door for her colleague, a huge rock tumbled to the ground.
Ms Walcott was wounded on the side of her head and face. Her nose was bleeding. Glass had lodged in her face. Her arm was sore from being hit with rocks and she was badly bruised.
Ms Zanker cleaned Ms Walcott’s wounds and sat up with her all night to ensure she didn’t have a concussion.
“We were quite frightened last night,” Ms Walcott told police the next day.
“I think there was tension in the air here amongst the police, I think it was just the unknown, not knowing what was going to happen.
“I do remember thinking, even with the police presence, ‘I might die tonight’.”
At the end of her interview, the officer asked Walcott whether she wanted police to proceed with charges if they identified anyone who had thrown rocks at the ambulance and caused her injuries or damage to the vehicle.
“Say for instance someone makes an admission that they have thrown a rock and they’ve seen it smash the window or something like that,” the officer said.
“If we are able to identify these people, would you like us to proceed with charges with relation to your injuries and the damage to the ambulance?”
Ms Walcott replied: “Definitely I would”.
A couple of weeks later, on November 26, a Yuendumu man told another detective he had thrown rocks at the ambulance as it drove back from the airstrip.
The 17-year-old also admitted to “shooting rocks” at the police vehicles immediately after Mr Walker was shot.
Kumanjayi Walker
He told police he had been at his big sister-cousin’s house when the police vehicles drove past sometime after 7pm that night.
When the teenager saw the police cars pull up near house 511 he got up and went over with two relatives.
When he arrived, he saw police in the yard outside before hearing gunshots.
He then saw two police officers carry Mr Walker out of the house and through the yard to their vehicle, before lifting him into the cage on the back of the paddy wagon.
“I was getting wild and they (police) started to leave me,” he told the Darwin-based detective during a recorded interview at Old School House in Yuendumu.
“I will just get the rock and shoot that thing, Police Toyota.
“And after that when they were take him through here, start getting rocks and just shooting that thing.
“Just running through this way, shooting them rock.
“They just drove off. Then I ran this way, get rock, just ran this way, get a rock and shoot up that, them, Police Toyota.”
The man said he then “marched up to the police station” where he “was waiting for news”.
When the police and ambulance convoyed out to the airstrip to meet the Police Air Wing plane, the man and his relatives followed.
“They (police) escaped that way now it was really fast, it was just going (to) that air – air strip, really fast,” he said.
“It was that day that we smashed the, um, ambulance Toyota.
“Just my uncle was standing … was standing at um, right at um …”
At that point a detective who was also in the room interjected and advised the man to “steer clear” of saying anything more about attacking the ambulance.
“I’m not gonna ask you to tell me anything more about the ambulance right now because um, if you’ve done something that’s not the right thing … you have different rights when it comes to you maybe having done something wrong,” the officer explained.
“I’m not saying you’re going to be in trouble for that but we need to look into that a bit more, so I don’t want you to um, say something.”
Another officer told him: “We don’t wanna talk about it now.”
More than 26 months later, the man – who has other matters before the courts – has not been charged with any offences related to throwing rocks at the ambulance or police vehicles in November 2019.
The NT Police did not respond to questions.
The Australian is not suggesting the police officers involved have acted improperly, only that it remains unclear why this part of the investigation has not been progressed.
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
Kristin Shorten is an award-winning investigative journalist. She began her media career at The Courier-Mail newspaper in 2009 and has since reported for various News Corp mastheads including The Australian a… Read