None of the four Queensland police officers were older than 30, but the horrors they were about to experience at 251 Wains Road would shock even the most hardened cop.
They’d been sent to the remote area of Wieambilla, halfway between Chinchilla and Tara, in south-eastern Queensland, to find a missing person. It was in the middle of a known radio blackspot, with residents so off the grid some of them laid booby traps.
Instead, they ran into an ambush, which would later be labelled as Australia’s first extremist Christian terrorist attack.
For the last week an inquest led by Queensland coroner Terry Ryan has heard evidence about what happened on that day in December 2022. Ryan has been tasked with unconvering why brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train, and Gareth’s wife, Stacey Train, shot and killed two police officers and tried to hunt down more, with neighbour Alan Dare also killed in the massacre. The court has heard the trio were conspiracy theorists who planned to kill police, and followed an extreme form of “premillennialism”, a fundamentalist Christian belief system.
The twelfth of December 2022 started like an ordinary day at Tara police station.
Craig Loveland, a second-year police constable, was the only officer rostered on that morning. He took three reports at the front counter early that Monday, one a rape allegation, another an alleged indecent treatment of a child. But writing them up had to wait when something more urgent came up: a trio of active incidents –one regarding domestic violence, an attempted suicide in progress and a person going armed. All were graded as “code two”, the second most urgent emergency possible.
He also had to get their only working LandCruiser back from the mechanic, where he had taken it that morning. Another vehicle had its window smashed and a third had a persistent mechanical problem and its battery had been taken out. Loveland was later delayed from attending a code one by the need to reinstall it in a hurry.
Timeline
Wieambilla shootings
Show
Nathaniel Train reported missing to NSW police. There is also a warrant out for his arrest on firearms charges. This is referred to the Queensland Police.
Gareth is informed by email about the missing person’s report and responds with a message including anti-police comments.
Job assigned to Chinchilla police, who seek assistance from Tara police. Four police travel to the property.
4.35pm
Constables Matthew Arnold, Rachel McCrow, Randall Kirk and Keely Brough arrive at 251 Wains Road, Wieambilla.
4.37pm
Nathaniel Train shoots constable Arnold dead from a prepared ambush position, known as a “hide”.
4.46pm
Constable McCrow, who had been wounded by rifle fire, is shot dead at close range by Gareth Train. She pleads for her life.
5.30pm
Civilian Alan Dare killed by a gunshot to the torso from an unknown Train after going to the property to fight a fire. Wife Kelly is not told of the shooting incident during a 000 call.
5.30pm
Police issue public service preservation act warning for the Wieambilla area, banning civilian movement.
6.37pm
Constable Brough rescued by uniformed police extraction team. They also remove bodies of McCrow and Arnold, but not Dare.
7.40pm
Police Special Emergency Response Team arrive and take over the police inner cordon.
10.39pm
Last of the Trains, Nathaniel, is killed by operators from the police Special Emergency Response Team. Massacre ends.
Two of the code two incidents were at “the blocks”, an area where police were strictly advised not to go alone. He described it at a low-income, high-drug use area with a large number of people living off the grid.
He said many of the properties had signs reading “don’t enter or you will be shot”. Others were rigged with booby traps.
“Certain addresses in the blocks had flags in regards to man traps … you’d find pits, spikes, other things around the blocks in certain properties generally to injure persons entering,” he told the inquest.
Counsel assisting Ruth O’Gorman asked whether being alone on duty was an easy task.
“I wouldn’t say it’s ideal no,” he said.
Loveland called in two other police from leave, constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, in their second and third years respectively. Arnold was the only officer at the station trained in the use of a rifle.
That afternoon, he advised them to go to a fourth job, a less urgent one, a code three. It was a missing person’s matter, but there was also a warrant out for the man’s arrest on firearms charges. Loveland said in other circumstances he might have gone there on his own, after a risk assessment.
Neither officer would return alive.
Terror in Wieambilla
In fact the job wasn’t Tara’s responsibility at all.
Const Randall Kirk, of Chinchilla police station, in his second year in uniform, informed McCrow and Arnold over the phone that they were to attend in a support role. He’d been to the Wieambilla address a number of times previously, but had never seen anyone.
He wanted them partly because his partner, Keely Brough, was in her eighth or ninth week on the job.
The inquest has heard that relatives of the Trains had received anti-police messages from them after informing them via email about the missing person’s report. It has since emerged that Gareth was communicating via social media with an American conspiracy theorist, Donald Day Jr, who has been charged with offences in the US. None of this was reported to the police at Chinchilla and Tara, and the job raised few red flags, the inquest has heard.
The four officers arrived at about 4.30pm and proceeded up the long driveway.
A shot rang out: Arnold was dead.
The other officers scattered.
McCrow was hit in the back and then hit again and again, but was still alive.
Kirk, hiding behind a tree, could physically see her rolling around in pain but he only had a pistol effective to 15 metres, and they clearly had some sort of large-calibre rifle. He watched as a man, Gareth Train, approached. She pleaded for her life, and he shot her dead.
Within minutes, senior police were notified.
As scores of squad cars descended on Wieambilla, officers found the radios grew more and more unreliable. Phone reception was spotty, for calls and for police reporting equipment.
The two surviving officers at the scene couldn’t make a radio call – but found their phones worked.
Kirk made a phone call to his superior before fleeing at 4.40pm.
At 4.44pm Brough called triple zero. Operator Katherine Beilby, picked up her phone at the Toowoomba communications room, and didn’t get off for two hours. The police commissioner praised her during the inquest for saving the young officer’s life.
The Trains hunted Brough for hours. They lit the bush on fire to smoke her out. It was so hot she could feel it through the soles of her boots. She thought she was going to die. She told it all to Beilby.
At times during her teary testimony, on Tuesday, it was like Beilby was still on the phone with Brough. Sometimes she crouched down in her seat as if hiding beside the young constable, still concealed in that bush in Wieambilla, two years later.
Widow of Wieambilla shooting victim Alan Dare calls triple zero at 5.13pm
She immediately entered the job as a “hot job”, which orders every vehicle within range to head to the location at maximum possible speed, with lights and sirens. Beilby also entered regular updates into a statewide system available to all operators, and the police.
after newsletter promotion
The message didn’t get to everyone. At 5.13pm Kelly and Alan Dare, who lived across the road from the Trains, called triple zero to report a fire and gunshots.
The operator asked “is this on the Wains Road area?”
“Have you had others [calls]?” Kelly asks.
“Do you think it might be 251 [Wains Road]?” the operator asks later.
“I have police at 251.”
Widow of Wieambilla shooting victim Alan Dare calls triple zero at 5.17pm
She later says, “I probably would stay at home”. The inquest heard Alan was already gone by then.
Kerry said if the operator had told her about the shooting, she would have phoned him to come home.
At about 5.30pm Alan was shot and killed.
The same minute, police issued an order under the Public Safety Preservation Act, preventing civilians from moving in the area. It was posted on social media.
A police officer told the inquest that organising an emergency text message through a system used by the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services in natural disasters would have taken 45 minutes.
‘Prepare to engage’
Every police officer knew Brough needed to be rescued immediately.
There wasn’t time to wait for the police Special Emergency Response Team, the Queensland version of Swat. Even their helicopter wouldn’t arrive in time.
Sgt Werner Crous decided to send in ordinary uniformed officers, particularly those who could carry a rifle.
“On the way there I thought to myself that I need four people to form a team to go to where these officers are,” Crous told the inquest. He didn’t think many would volunteer to go back into what one witness called a “fatal funnel” of gunfire.
Officers Minz, Gates, Abbott, Boparai, Rix, Hopp, Parsons, Miller, Larkin, Brown, Lyell and Norman formed up. They were advised to “prepare to engage”.
Sgt Andrew Gates, the highway patrol officer who led the operation, told the court he “didn’t want to go in, but I did”.
“Instead of just getting four people willing to enter this dangerous situation I got four carloads full of people,” Crous said. On Friday, the police union president paid tribute to their bravery.
They advanced slowly, and called out to Brough.
Brough was initially too afraid to leave – the court heard she didn’t believe they were police – but someone came up with a code.
“It was the dispatcher, she said to me: ‘Kath tell Keely when she hears “pink and blue” make a run for it,’” Beilby told the inquest.
Gates said the officers yelled out colours until they saw the officer run out of hiding, holding her gun.
She was safe.
But the Trains still hadn’t given up their desire to kill police.
Acting Sen Sgt Christina Esselink later decided to block the front gate to cut off the Trains’ escape. Loveland, who was in the car, described coming under fire by large-calibre rounds.
“You could hear it zip,” he told the coroner’s court on Thursday, motioning that the round went just by his head.
Brough was excused from giving evidence at the inquest for mental health reasons.
Next week the inquest will hear testimony about how the incident came to an end, with the death of the three Trains.
On 12 and 13 August, it will hear evidence from a series of psychologists and colleagues about the motivation of the trio, who are believed to have held extremist Christian beliefs. The coroner is expected to hear that the incident is regarded as a terrorist attack designed to further those beliefs, and that the trio were suffering from a shared psychotic delusion.
The inquest continues.