‘I can’t stop crying, you’ve got a gun to my head’
The officer kept yelling at me and told me to stop crying . . .
A POLICE officer pointed a gun at a Palm Island teenager’s head and told her to stop crying during raids there 11 years ago, a trial has heard.
Schanara Bulsey was giving evidence at the groundbreaking federal court trial on Palm Island, an Aboriginal community on the Great Barrier Reef in North Queensland, to determine whether alleged police failures after riots were racially discriminatory.
The riots were triggered by the 2004 death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee.
Bulsey was 15 when her house was raided and her father, Lex Wotton, was tasered and taken away.
He was eventually jailed for inciting the riots.
An emotional Schanara Bulsey recalled taking directions from police in a bedroom at her home.
‘‘The officer kept yelling at me and told me to stop crying,’’ she sobbed.
‘‘I told him ‘I can’t stop crying, you’ve got a gun to my head’.’’
Counsel for the state of Queensland Steven Forrest suggested the officer would have just been holding out his gun rather than intentionally pointing it at her head.
But Bulsey said she was not mistaken, saying she saw the gun pointing at her out of the corner of her eye.
She did not seek counselling after the raid, but wished she had to ‘‘help get the image out of my head’’.
William Blackman Sr, who was good friends with Mulrunji, ran into the bush to try to lead riot police away from his children, who he said would have been ‘‘terrorised’’ by the raids.
He told the court he was left handcuffed in the back of a paddywagon all night, after handing himself in.
Blackman believes the investigation into his friend’s death was a ‘‘cover-up’’ and is saddened he missed Mulrunji’s funeral before he was acquitted.
‘‘You couldn’t give your friend the respect he deserved,’’ counsel for the community Chris Ronalds, SC, suggested. ‘‘That’s right,’’ Blackman said. The court has previously heard from two other islanders who were children during the raids.
One thought she would be shot and another, Albert Wotton, believed police would kill his father.
The trial is being held in a special court at a school on Palm Island.