An inquest for an Indigenous teen shot dead by an NT policeman has heard some of the officers involved turned off their body-worn cameras during the incident.

October 21, 2022

After a policeman shot an Indigenous teenager dead in a remote Northern Territory community, he asked other officers involved to turned off their body-worn cameras, an inquest has been told.

Constable Zachary Rolfe shot Kumanjayi Walker, 19, three times during a botched outback arrest in Yuendumu, northwest of Alice Springs, on November 9, 2019.

After the Walpiri man died on the floor at the local police station, Const Rolfe asked his colleagues “is anyone on” to ensure none had their body-worn cameras recording.

Sergeant Adam Donaldson, who was at the scene when Mr Walker was shot in a nearby house, replied “I’m turning mine off” and did so.

“We were coming together in the middle and I think the whole point of that was to see if everybody was okay,” he told the Alice Springs inquest on Thursday when asked to explain why he did it.

“I would probably concede that is not what it looks like but to me a lot of things had just happened.

“That was the first, and I’ll call it a lull in what had happened in all that night, where we could just take a breath.”

Sgt Donaldson turned his camera on again 14 minutes later at 11.28pm when he was inside a vehicle outside the police station.

The coroner has heard that about that time, a senior officer ordered the officers in Yuendumu to drive to the local airfield in a convoy with an ambulance to meet a Royal Flying Doctor Service plane.

It was a ruse to trick more than 100 concerned community members, who had gathered outside the police compound, into believing Mr Walker was still alive and being evacuated to Alice Springs for medical treatment.

It worked and it wasn’t until the next morning that the community learned their countryman had actually died at 8.36pm.

The RFDS wasn’t there to help Mr Walker. It was transporting elite tactical response force police officers to the community of 800 and evacuating Const Rolfe.

Sgt Donaldson agreed with the Walker’s family’s lawyer, Claire O’Neil, that his decision to switch of his camera meant there was no record of what happened inside the police station during a critical incident for the 14 minutes.

He also accepted that the police force use body-worn cameras to accurately preserve evidence and to protect officers from allegations of a cover-up.

The inquest continues on Friday.