A glimpse of hope, then another Aboriginal death in custody: ‘grief-stricken’ campaigners mourn lack of progress

Wed, 4 Jun 2025 18:19:50 +1000

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/04/a-glimpse-of-hope-then-another-death-in-custody-grief-stricken-campaigners-mourn-lack-of-progress-ntwnfb>

"The supermarket is silent except for wails of grief.

A small procession makes a slow pilgrimage down aisle four of the Alice Springs
Coles, where their loved one – a 24-year-old Warlpiri man with a disability –
lost consciousness after being restrained by police. He later died in hospital.

Outside, the man’s grandfather, Warlpiri elder Ned Hargraves, addressed a crowd
of hundreds from his mobility scooter.

“Enough is enough,” he said on Friday. “This cannot keep going.”

Five years after the Black Lives Matter movement promised a reckoning for
racial injustice in Australia, the grim reality facing Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people is eerily familiar.

In 2020, the nation was reeling from the fatal shooting of 19-year-old
Kumanjayi Walker by Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe in the
central desert community of Yuendumu. Rolfe was charged with murder, but later
acquitted.

This month, as the community braced for the findings of a bruising two-year
inquest into the death, they learned another young Warlpiri man from Yuendumu –
now known as Kumanjayi White – had died after being restrained by police in the
Coles supermarket in Alice Springs.

“We were looking forward to truly beginning our healing process,” Walker’s
cousin, Samara Fernandez-Brown, said in a statement.

“You have thrown us right back to the start, reopening wounds that were just
beginning to scab over.”"

Cheers,
       *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

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