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Repeat death in police custody for WA officer
1points
An inquest concluded last week into the death in custody of a 35 year old
Perth male nurse from heart and respiratory failure, during his roadside arrest in Rockingham on April 15, 2006.
According to medical evidence presented to the court, Karl Jason Nightingale was brain dead at the scene of his arrest, but was resuscitated and put on ventilation for two days.
During the inquest, WAPOL Senior Constable Aiden Sloan, one of two officers first to attend, explained how he had fallen on Nightingale while trying to restrain him.
However, his partner Constable Annette Mitchell(formerly Revell), said while trying to handcuff the dazed and injured man, both the officers had fallen on top of him after failing to pin him against the back of the squad car.
Two cuts on the back of his head indicated Karl Nightingale may have suffered a concussion immediately prior to the arrest as a result of a minor traffic accident on Dixon Road, Rockingham.
Questions about positional asphyxia arose once again for WAPOL officers who hand-cuffed & arrested Nightingale for wandering dazed and confused near traffic.
Senior Constable Sloan had attended another call only four days previously, during which a 35 year old Ngoongar father of three, Karl John Woods, died after resisting arrest.
The Woods family and friends and the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee of Western Australia took the unusual step of marching on the Department of Premier and Cabinet, with placards showing photos of the cuts, bruising and injuries evident on Karl Woods’ body.
The deputy coroner found that though baton use was evident via the bruising on Mr Woods lower body he died as a result of heart failure due to ischemic heart disease, after violent exertion and a large dose of high-purity amphetamines.
The Acting Inspector of Rockingham Police Station when Nightingale was arrested, Russell August, faced a grilling before the deputy coroner over failing to call forensics to inspect the scene.
In one phone transcript shortly after the incident, August said he was concerned about ‘support for the boy,’ because it was Sloan’s second brush with a death in custody in four days.
A forensics officer, Detective Senior Constable Marsh, said he was later instructed to attend the hospital during the two days Nightingale was on life support, specifically ‘to search for drugs and drug paraphernalia’ in Nightingale’s clothes.
Police alleged Nightingale’s car contained empty drug bags with traces of high-purity amphetamines but no forensic evidence was tendered to the inquest by police despite a requirement that all deaths in custody be treated as a homicide investigation.
In another phone transcript read to the deputy coroner, Acting Inspector August instructed the officer at the hospital, (former) Detective Senior Constable David Blockley, to not to give the family too much detail.
‘Don’t mention the handcuffs and coppers, or the old man will go, you know, **** for brains,’ August said to Blockley.
Under high-pressure questioning, August told the court his original statement to Internal Affairs was done under off-camera threats from investigators.
He later signed an amended statement that had a paragraph removed in which he blamed the head of the WAPOL Deaths in Custody Coordination Unit, Fred Zagami, for the forensics unit not attending the scene.
Superintendent Zagami told the deputy coroner August was mistaken in that paragraph of his original statement and that he had reprimanded him, re-written it, and August had then signed it.
Though both men have spent over two decades serving in the Criminal Intelligence Bureau and over three decades as WAPOL officers, Zagami claimed they had met only a few times during cadets and August said he had never met Zagami before his Internal Affairs interview.
David Blockley said when he arrived at the scene Revell and Sloan had blood on their shirts and Nightingale’s face looked like ‘one giant scab,’ which he concluded was blood covered in sand from construction work on the roadside.
Blockley said that all three times Karl Nightingale had been placed lying in a face-down position he had exhibited laboured breathing, with him administering CPR the third time, after the man gasped and his body went limp.
Giving evidence to the Coroner’s Court, Aiden Sloan, present during both deaths, said Nightingale’s inability to walk to the police van was just a refusal, adding, ‘it didn’t occur to me that he couldn’t walk, I didn’t hear any bones crack and he didn’t say “I can’t walk.”’
Blockley, who entered the WA police by the DEAT program with many years of experience as a detective in the UK, said he had concerns for the man’s health and described how during Nightingale’s arrest, ‘his eyes were dead ahead,’ and when officers tried to walk him to the van he was a ‘dead weight.’
Mr Blockley also said that when the two arresting officers and a further six attending officers restrained him Mr Nightingale shouted, ‘I’m a nurse why are you doing this to me?’
The findings will be made available in May.
Comments
Ooh - look, Norg software censors out swearwords - it said ’****’ just for the public record…
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D’oh…
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s h i t ?
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Wholly holy spot on, Brown Wren.
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I am a parent of Karl Jason Nightingale and attended the whole coronial inquest and also parts of Carl Woods,s inquest. There was a high level of corruption involved before the inquest and during the inquest which was held in Fremantle justice centre and not the main coroners court in Perth. We were told originaly that the reason for it being held in Fremantle was due to renovations being done at the Perth court. We (and all of the witnesses were given the address of the Fremantle courthouse in Henderson st and when we arrived there we discovered that this courthouse was no longer in use. When we found the justice centre, we checked the court lists and discovered that there was no listing and i asked a security officer where was the inquest for Karl Nightingale being held and he said he knew nothing of it but then said he had been told that there was going to be something going on in courtroom number 1. Due to this suppression some of the witnesses got lost and were late. No media was in attendance and we were told that the case wasnt spectaculor enough and there was another case being heard in the Perth coroners court at the same time which was that of the death of a Korean student who died skydiving ??~~bizzar~`he took a risk and i dont think there was any where near the same speculation as our sons case~~and what happened about the renovations ??. We had to wait a year for the police to submitt the statements of the officers involved and when they finaly arrived Felicity Zepmlas phoned us to say we could view the statements and take dot points from them but could not remove them from the coroners office. We took dot points and obviously were concentrating on the important facts but when we finaly engaged lawyers and were able to gain copies to take home we were horrified to discover that mostly all of our dot pointed pages had been removed and replaced with a totally different page. I could go on forever here and you would be absolutely stunned at what actually happened and we will be following up with the whole event but we are waiting for the final findings from the coroner which we know will be to cover for police as they use the medical practitioners to cover these cases up. We attended the Carl Woods case by request from the coroners office to attend the medical evidence. When questioning these doctors they use a line of questioning such as ~`”but is it possible dr that a person who is drug or alchohol affected could possibly die without any intervenment from police officers” ~and the answer of course is yes and they did the same with our sons death even though the positional asphyxia was also given as a possible cause of death so we are expecting the findings to be caused by drug in the system even though the toxicology report stated that it was of normal recreational level. We have put together a full story of the avents leading up to the inquest and during the inquest and several copies have been sent to various places for safe keeping. In the meantime we are confident that there will be a whistle blower soon as three of the officers have left the force since the incident and one of them (a female) fled to Queensland leaving behind her children with her husband after a domestic arguement.(her husband is also a police officer. She was unable to be found and we believe that she would not bend to internal affairs when questioned and threatned to tell the truth if she had to give evidence. Her evidence was crucial to us as she stated that on three occassions they had Karl on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back and on at least one of those occassions there were five of them on top of him and two of them performing a figure 4 leg lock. It was on this 3rd time in that position that they said he took a last gasp and then stopped breathing and urinated himself (and we also discovered from the hospital staff that he soiled his underpants. Obviously the last gasp was not an inward gasp but his lungs expeling whatever air he had left in there as he died. The officer who originaly handcuffed him was at that time some 20 metres away from the scene searching Karls car and he was an older officer and still using the old peerless handcuffs that use a skeletal type key and not the later (more comfortable type) saflok handcuffs. Most of the other officers were relatively new to the force and had the later model cuffs that use a totally different key. His brain was hypoxic (totally brain dead due to lack of oxygen) and to be in that condition he would have had to have gone without oxygen for several minutes.??I hope i am painting a picture here for you.~~Great bit of police responsibility.
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I forgot to mention that at the Carl Woods,s coronial inquest the autopsy revealed that the front section of the lower jaw was totally knocked out along with teeth and was found loged in the roof of his mouth. His lungs were half full of blood and he was thrown into a police van face down in that condition and when the van was later opened he was found dead. Officer Sloan said that he never used a baton or a mag light torch to strike him as did all other officers but Sloan did admitt that he had tried to knee him in the stomach but thought he had missed and this was how he most likely sustained that injury. ~what a lot of garbage.
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