Raymond Noel Lindsay Thomas died in a police chase that began when he was driving home from a Sunday night dessert run to his local supermarket in suburban Melbourne.
Just before 11pm on 25 June 2017, with a block of chocolate on the passenger seat, Raymond Noel, as his family called him, started his Holden Commodore station wagon, pulled out of the car park at the Preston South Woolworths on to Dundas Street, and turned left.
Within minutes he was dead, thrown from his car when it ploughed into four parked cars and caught alight on Victoria Road, just 2.4km from the supermarket.
He was pursued by a highway patrol car. The police announced his death in a radio call to their area command, just 21 seconds after first formally calling in their pursuit. The call was short. “He’s come to grief. He’s come to grief.”
More than two years later, Raymond Noel’s family have begun the lengthy process of a coronial inquest to determine how and why the police pursuit occurred.
First, the coroner, John Olle, must determine when the pursuit began. According to both the police driver, Sergeant John Sybenga, and his offsider, Senior Constable Debra McFarlane, it did not start until they turned from Dundas Street on to Victoria Road. They said they had run the Commodore’s number plates on Dundas Street, determined it was unregistered, and turned to follow it. At Victoria Road, both officers said in their sworn statements, they saw that someone — believed to be the Commodore — had hit a parked car and initiated a pursuit.
GPS data retrieved from the highway patrol car’s mobile data terminal tells a different story.
The speed limit on Dundas Road is 50km/h. Counsel assisting Michael Rivette told a directions hearing at the coroners court in Melbourne on Wednesday that the GPS data indicated the police car reached more than twice that speed.
Rivette said the mobile data terminal recorded speeds of 93km/h, 111km/h and 116km/h at various points on Dundas Road, before the pursuit, according to police statements, had even begun.
Once police turned into Victoria Street, the speeds recorded by the GPS system were even higher: 121km/h, and then 154km/h.
Raymond Noel’s speed just before the crash, calculated by two CCTV cameras along Victoria Road, was 157km. He had veered on to the wrong side of the road and lost control of the Commodore when he swung back in an effort to avoid an oncoming car, the coroners court heard.
“Speed of the police vehicle at all relevant times is highly critical and the evidence at the moment is deficient in relation to that,” Rivette said.
The accuracy of the mobile data terminals was tested, and eventually accepted, at an inquest in 2012.
If Victoria police do not accept that the GPS data is showing the accurate speeds, and that their officers’ statements are inconsistent with the objective data, the accuracy of the systems will have to be proved again.
‘Big man with a big heart’
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are over-represented in all death in custody statistics, but that over-representation is higher in deaths involving a motor vehicle pursuit. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Indigenous people made up 20% of all deaths in police custody between 1989-90 and 2016-17 but 22% of all motor vehicle deaths.
According to evidence before the court, police did not identify Raymond Noel before the crash and his race, and at this stage, it is not included as a causal factor in the inquest scope.
Raymond Noel was from a well-known Aboriginal family in Thornbury. At 6’8” (203cm) tall, he stood out. His family called him “Big Raymond”, the “gentle giant”. He was particularly devoted to his nieces.
“Our Raymond was a big man with a big heart,” his family said on Wednesday. “As big and strong as he was, Raymond had a caring nature and a beautiful soul.”
He was a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Wiradjuri man. His father, Ray Thomas, is an award-winning artist whose work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria.
His family is arguing, through the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, for limitations to the discretion of police officers to start a pursuit. Those limitations have been put in place before, by Olle.
Thomas sat in the front row of the coroners court on Wednesday, sandwiched between his son Frank and a family ally, and nodded as Olle addressed him.
“We can’t bring Raymond Noel back but we can learn lessons,” Olle said. “That’s the hope.”
Police pursuit policy
In 2015 police reformed their pursuit policy in response to recommendations Olle made in an inquest into the death of Sarah Booth, a 17-year-old killed in a police pursuit in 2006.
Olle’s recommendations included a rule that police “should never pursue a vehicle simply because it is fleeing” but must instead believe on “reasonable grounds” that intercepting the vehicle was “necessary to prevent a serious risk to public health and safety”. Vehicles could also be intercepted in response to a serious criminal offence or to prevent a serious criminal offence that would cause serious harm.
A recommendation to install video cameras in all highway patrol vehicles, at an estimated cost of $2.4m, was not implemented.
“I am bewildered, to be honest, that all these years later we don’t have in-car video, in-car audio,” Olle told the court on Wednesday. “We wouldn’t have to go through this process [of reviewing data].”
The assistant commissioner Robert Hill told the media in 2015 that under the previous policy “you could effectively pursue anyone or anything in terms of offending”.
But the newly restricted policy was broadened again when a driver who evaded police pursuits killed five pedestrians in Bourke Street mall in 2017.
“This pursuit policy has had a number of iterations and changes,” counsel for the family, Antony Trood, said. “To understand the current one we need to know the background, we need to know the changes.”
The inquest will be heard in April 2020.