For five weeks at the inquest into the Wieambilla shooting, the counsel assisting, Ruth O’Gorman, remained impassive while taking evidence from tearful police employees, surviving family and even one officer who was shot at the scene.
On Thursday, the 16th and last day, the court heard from the mother of slain constable Matthew Arnold, who said “time isn’t healing our wounds; our trauma remains intense”. It was a message shared by all family members of victims; five spoke on the final day.
In the afternoon, as O’Gorman was summing up, the experienced lawyer finally cracked up.
She was describing how the bodies of the three victims, civilian Alan Dare and constables Arnold and Rachel McCrow, were removed from the scene, under a “guard of honour”.
“All police officers then in attendance lined up and saluted all three.”
She appeared to cry.
The coroner Terry Ryan asked for a brief adjournment.
When court returned O’Gorman described the guard of honour as “appropriate”.
All five family members of the dead wanted answers.
“While the inquest exposed the evil acts which brutally ended Matt and Rachel’s hopes and ambitions, it also highlighted serious operational failings that we believe could have prevented this tragedy. Matt and Rachel’s deaths must not be in vain,” Sue Arnold said.
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 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 Const Arnold dead from a prepared ambush position, known as a “hide”.
4.46pm
Const 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
Const 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. Shooting ends.
O’Gorman concluded that no government and no other organisation had any idea what the Trains would do on 12 December 2022.
Nonetheless, Ryan closed the hearing on Thursday by telling the court there were “clearly lessons to be learned from this tragedy”.
What happened
Four Queensland police officers from two police stations, Chinchilla and Tara, were tasked with making a missing person search and executing an arrest warrant at the remote property at 251 Wains Road, Wieambilla.
Constables Arnold, McCrow, Randall Kirk and Keely Brough hopped the fence to enter the “bush block”.
None of them were older than 30. None had body armour, or a rifle.
They had no idea that Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train were lying in wait. The murderous trio had spent months establishing a “hide”, a hidden shooting position.
They were also heavily armed, with large-calibre bolt-action rifles.
When police were 70 metres away, they opened fire. Nathaniel Train instantly killed with his first shot.
McCrow was injured three times by gunfire and couldn’t move.
She tried to fight back, emptying her pistol at Gareth as he approached. The range was too far.
The inquest heard she had used her last moments to record a message on her bodyworn camera to her parents: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
He executed her at close range, in cold blood.
Meanwhile, Kirk and Brough hid.
Kirk fired at Gareth too, but his pistol was inadequate for the task. It was too far for him to hit.
Bodyworn camera footage shows he narrowly escaped death fleeing the property. He was hit and wounded.
Brough’s ordeal was far longer.
She spent more than two hours trapped in a grassed area, constantly under threat of death.
The inquest heard she thought she was going to die.
At one point the Trains tried to use fire to burn her out.
Why did they do it?
The inquest heard Gareth Train struggled with undiagnosed mental illness perhaps from birth.
He initially suffered paranoid personality disorder, believing in all sorts of false conspiracy theories as a teenager, everything from the moon landing to Port Arthur.
As a young adult, he invited two romantic partners into a suicide pact, an eerie echo of his death alongside his wife by “suicide by cop”, it heard.
But it was only later in life – perhaps in 2015, when Gareth and wife Stacey, who was previously married to Nathaniel Train, moved to Wieambilla – that his beliefs turned from silly to sinister.
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Covid-19 seems to have been a trigger. By as early as the end of 2020, he had sucked Stacey and Nathaniel into what the inquest heard was a “shared delusional disorder”. Under the spell of Gareth – the “primary” – the three Trains came to believe the end of the world was just months away, based on religious beliefs and the Covid pandemic. They believed the government was persecuting them, and police would one day come to kill them.
Both Stacey and Nathaniel were high-ranking education staff, Nathaniel a New South Wales school principal. They resigned their jobs at the end of 2021 over Covid-19 vaccinations.
The inquest heard from Prof Michele Pathé, an experienced forensic psychiatrist who helped establish the Queensland Fixated Threat Assessment Centre. Staffed by mental health workers and police, it is designed to identify and respond to the threat posed by mental illness by providing the care people need.
The psychiatrist explained about 16% of referrals to the centre were diagnosed with delusional personality disorder, like the Trains.
The diagnosis was relatively uncommon, but that was probably because it was underdiagnosed. Sufferers “tend to present rationally”, O’Gorman said.
O’Gorman said it would be appropriate for the coroner to recommend the centre receive more resourcing.
“Such improved resourcing is important in light of the rise, she says, of profoundly alienated and grievance-fuelled individuals in Australia’s current economic and political climate,” O’Gorman said.
She also suggested to the coroner that he find that the state government should impose mandatory mental health checks for weapons licence applicants.
The terrorism debate
One of the central questions Ryan will need to answer is whether the Trains’ actions amount to terrorism.
Most witnesses who addressed the question, including the Queensland police deputy commissioner Cheryl Scanlon argued that their actions did fit the definition under commonwealth law, which requires an ideological objective.
Those who disputed the charge instead blamed the mental illness every witness conceded was at least also a major contributing factor.
In a report tendered to the court, Pathé argued that trying to distinguish the two was a “false dichotomy in which attacks are viewed as either the act of an irrational, mentally ill person or a rational, sane terrorist”.
Associate prof Josh Roose of Deakin University raised another theory – “algorithmic radicalisation”, a process where a social media algorithm is programmed to radicalise a viewer by showing them increasingly extreme material.
Roose revealed to the court that in the course of researching the extremist premillennial Christian beliefs held by the Trains that he started to be recommended more and more of the material, through his algorithm.
“There is a significant challenge facing Australia, but also western democracy as a whole, around the posting of extreme material online and violent extremist material online,” he said.
“It is possible for conspiratorial-minded people to be dragged further and further into a rabbit hole.”
The final shootout
It was the highly trained operatives of the Special Emergency Response Team – Queensland’s answer to Swat – who finally ended the siege.
At about 9.10pm, four vehicles, including a heavily armoured Bearcat, drove to confront the Trains.
By this time they had fallen back on a stronghold established around their house. They had set up a second elaborate defensive position.
A negotiator from the Bearcat urged the Trains to surrender.
They responded by shooting the vehicle over and over, with rounds repeatedly smashing the left-hand side of its windscreen, in front of its driver.
Wieambilla shooting
Police negotiator tells Trains to stop firing their weapons before Wieambilla shootout
Gareth was the first to die, by headshot, at 10.32pm.
Stacey fired from inside the house, but ran outside to continue the fight. She was shot and fell down the stairs at 10.36pm.
Nathaniel kept up heavy fire from behind his wood barricade.
“Mate, it doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t want to hurt you, weapons down and your hands up, that’s all it has to be,” Sen Const Will Goodwin told him.
In response Nathaniel set aside his rifle, and took up one of the dead officers’ pistols.
He stood up from behind cover and fired the pistol. It was the last action he would take.
The former school principal was shot and killed at 10.39pm.
Counsel assisting submitted that Ryan consider recommending Queensland police develop the ability to fire from a helicopter, as a Sert commander had asked. He said the final battle may have been less risky for police that way.