Kumanjayi Walker’s remote community hopes a coronial inquest will bring justice after a Northern Territory policeman was acquitted of his murder.

March 12, 2022

A remote Indigenous community hopes a coronial inquest will bring justice after a Northern Territory policeman was acquitted of murdering one of their young men.

Kumanjayi Walker, 19, was fatally shot on November 9, 2019 as he resisted arrest at his grandmother’s home in Yuendumu, 290km northwest of Alice Springs.

The community’s grief over his death was compounded on Friday when the officer who fired the shots, Constable Zachary Rolfe, 30, was found not guilty of intentionally killing him.

Outside the Northern Territory Supreme Court in Darwin, Mr Walker’s cousin Samara Fernandez Brown said she did not believe justice had been served and the community was grieving.

“We are all in so much pain, particularly our young men. They have struggled. They have been scared but still, they respected this process and so has our whole community,” she said.

“We have been respectful … but still we have been let down.”

Const Rolfe said the jury had made “the right decision”, while supporters said he should never have faced court.

“A lot of people are hurting today, Kumanjayi’s family and his community, and it did not need to get to this point, so I am going to leave this space for them,” he said.

Ms Brown said the jury’s verdict was not the end of her community’s fight for Mr Walker and justice.

“We are deeply disappointed and although we’ve been given a trial I cannot honestly say that it has been fair,” she said.

“After some rest we will turn our attention to the coronial inquest where we hope our truth will finally be heard and so will questions that we have not had answers to.

Deputy Chair of the Parumpurru Justice Committee Valerie Napaljarri said the court system had not fulfilled its responsibility to the community.

“We are all so full of anger and grief. There has been no respect for our customary law or cultural ways of dealing with when someone kills another person,” she said.

“We know how to deal with it … but we are being disrespected. This is a racist system.”

Police body worn camera footage of the shooting shows Mr Walker fighting with Const Rolfe and another officer after they tried to handcuff him.

Mr Walker stabs Const Rolfe in the shoulder with a pair of scissors during the scuffle and he fires one shot into the teen’s back.

Const Rolfe fired the next two shots in quick succession 2.6 seconds later, when Mr Walker was lying on the ground.

The teen died about an hour after the second shot ripped through his spleen, lung, liver and a kidney.

A date for Mr Walker’s inquest has not been announced.