The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  With the basement declared empty, officers rushed towards Crews to check his pulse. Someone shouted for the paramedics. By the time they arrived, it was 9:23pm. Nearly twenty-one minutes had passed since he’d been shot. A paramedic rendering aid said Crews had gone into cardiac arrest and had no pulse or breathing. His injuries were most likely fatal. An officer, overhearing the comment, ordered the ambulance worker to keep going. ‘Don’t you ever stop,’ he said.

  Elsewhere in the car park, the MEOCS officers involved in the raid that night paced through the garage, walking in circles and clenching their hair. The reality of the nightmare was settling upon them. Every few minutes an anguished, choking shout would echo through the garage. Some were down on one knee.

  As officers moved in and out of the basement, one of the garage doors – number 8 – began to open. Three men were standing inside. They’d been hiding in there throughout the gunfight. ‘We were just playing cards in here and we heard gunshots,’ one of the men said as he got on the ground. An officer wrote down their names as they were each searched for weapons – Geehad Ghazi and two friends. A cursory search of the garage revealed no card table or cards, but there was an ice pipe sitting in an ashtray.

  Outside, a PolAir helicopter hovered over the unit block and kept a light pointed at one of the apartments on the first floor. Two Asian men had been spotted walking onto the balcony, checking the streets – Miagi and Hawkie. A MEOCS officer who had seen them got onto the police radio. ‘The people in that unit are the offenders from this shooting,’ the officer said. Angry residents bombarded Triple 0 with phone calls about the chopper, complaining about the noise and unaware of the situation in the garage.

  Chris Gerogiannis, the MEOCS uniform officer who was filming the warrant that night, was standing guard next to the apartment block’s entrance running a crime scene log when an officer appeared in front of him, a member of the Tactical Operation’s Unit Alpha Team. He wore a facemask and had a sub-machine gun across his body.

  ‘I need you to step away from the building,’ the officer said. ‘This area’s being locked down.’

  As Gerogiannis left, the tactical team moved inside, taking up positions close to Miagi’s apartment with negotiators stationed outside his door.

  It was nearly 9:45pm. Crews was en route to Liverpool Hospital in an ambulance being prepped for emergency surgery. It was around this time that Detective Inspector Mick Sheehy received a phone call from his commander at the Homicide Squad, Peter Cotter, briefing him on the events at Bankstown. Sheehy was in another part of Sydney observing a controlled meeting between an undercover operative and target being pursued over a murder, the execution of Michael McGurk, a shadowy businessman and money lender, who was killed outside his home in Cremorne on 3 September 2009. Within minutes, Sheehy had stopped what he was doing, handed over to the person sitting next to him, and was on his way to Bankstown.

  After twenty-five years as a police officer, Sheehy had already managed six Critical Incident Investigations and reviewed an untold number of others for his colleagues at Homicide. Few cases can be ranked as more difficult or more exhaustive. For a Critical Incident Investigation to be invoked someone has to be injured or killed at the hands of a police officer. On average, they run for years, taking the most traumatic moments of an officer’s career, often their lives, and pressure testing every reflex, every instinctive decision made in a heartbeat against departmental protocols, criminal law and civil liability. In a best-case scenario, the officer is cleared of wrongdoing and walks away spent. At worst, they can end up in prison, or on permanent stress leave, or emotionally shattered with their careers finished.

  Sheehy arrived at the command post on Meredith Street and was given a briefing on the current status of the operation. Top brass had gathered as well, senior officers ranking from superintendent right up to deputy commissioner. Sheehy was told that, for the moment, the building remained in lockdown. Negotiators were on standby trying to coax Miagi out of his apartment. He had barricaded himself inside his unit with his ex-wife, two stepchildren, and Hawkie, who, from the little that the negotiators had pieced together, had been with him inside the garage. The negotiators had been using a mobile phone to speak with Miagi, but had started using a loud hailer, urging him to come outside and surrender.

  At 11:10pm the door to his apartment finally inched open. A table and couch had been blocking the entry. Miagi emerged from the unit and presented himself to police with his hands up above his head. He walked towards the tactical officers and then dropped to his knees to be searched and cuffed, and then walked outside for a handover to members of Sheehy’s team.

  By that stage investigators had built a profile of him. He was no longer known by the nickname ‘Miagi’. His real name was Philip Nguyen. He was a 55-year-old Vietnamese man who had been married twice, divorced twice, had a drug habit, and had a previous conviction for supply for which he had spent time in prison. Intelligence checks came up clean: nothing for firearms, no history of assaulting police.

  He was met on the footpath by a Homicide detective and placed in the back of a police truck to be taken to Bankstown Police Station, where Sheehy’s team were settling in for a long night of interviews. Each of the MEOCS officers involved in the raid had already been taken back to the station, along with the three men allegedly playing cards in the garage, and the five people inside Nguyen’s apartment – his ex-wife, stepson, stepdaughter, and Tan Hung Chung, the man known as Hawkie. Dave Roberts had been excluded from this interview process for the evening. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting he’d flown into a visceral rage, punching the brick walls of the garage and headbutting a car. He and two others had been taken to hospital and sedated.

  Sheehy spoke to Roberts only briefly before he was taken away from the scene. By then the Homicide detective had seen photographs of Crews’s injuries, taken by an officer at Liverpool Hospital. While nothing had been confirmed, images of the injury strongly suggested that Crews had been struck by a police-issue bullet. Roberts, while not in a state to do any interviews that night anyway, would from then on need to talk to Sheehy with a lawyer present.

  With the building secured, crime scene officers moved into the basement to process the scene. Near the Toyota Camry they collected deformed bullets, copper jacketing and cigarette butts. Swabs of bloodstains were taken. The imprint of a shoe was photographed. Yellow exhibit markers were laid out next to metal fragments, an aqua-coloured t-shirt, and a Glock self-loading pistol belonging to William Crews that appeared to have jammed mid-fire. The layout of the car park was sketched and the erratic trajectory of each bullet was chased down. There were ricochet marks along the walls of Nguyen’s garage. One shot had flown through a clothing rack, a rolled-up carpet, an armchair, and then had finally fallen to the floor after losing its speed.

  Bankstown Police Station became the epicentre of the trauma, a scene of raw emotion – pale faces and tears. Current and former members of MEOCS walked through the station’s doors, having heard the reports on the radio. Their arrival was like a sad reunion, tragedy bringing the old faces together. Guys like Dave Adney, who no longer worked at the Squad, felt compelled to turn up in support. Several dozen others jumped out of bed or stopped what they were doing and hopped in their cars.

  For the ten officers involved in the raid, the hours that followed were an isolating experience. Sterile investigative procedures had kicked into gear as each of them was placed in separate rooms. They had colleagues around them for support, but conversations were limited to basic facts, words of comfort. Someone kept tabs on these discussions and steered them back each time they veered anywhere close to the events of the night. It was forbidden to discuss what had happened, but, really, what else was there to talk about; a friend and colleague had just been shot – the nightmare scenario – and no one could breathe a word about it. In the cops this was called ‘due process’, and it always took priority.

  For those further up the MEOCS chain of command
the night represented an extraordinary set of pressures. Moving around the station was Mick Ryan, the TAG commander, going room to room, running on adrenaline, and checking on his team who were all in various stages of grief. He was on autopilot, betraying little emotion, but the scenes would stay with him. In one room sat a member of the entry team, an officer who’d gone into the basement car park. When Ryan walked in, the officer looked up and burst into tears. ‘I’m so sorry, boss,’ he said.

  As the overall commander of that night’s operation, it was on Ryan to shepherd his team through the crisis. In his own mind he was running over the mechanics of the incident, trying to figure out what processes were followed, what was missed, what – if anything – hadn’t been done properly that day. How had it all gone wrong? Complicating his position was that he, too, had technically been involved in the raid as the overall commander, even though he wasn’t physically present at the scene.

  A few minutes after midnight, word filtered through from Liverpool Hospital. Mick Ryan gathered everyone together and delivered the news: Crews had died from his injuries, a gunshot wound to his neck and another to his shoulder. The post-mortem, due to take place in the morning, would determine with more certainty what had happened. Questions about friendly fire were already being asked.

  One by one, officers were called out of their rooms to provide urine samples or get breath tested to check for any traces of alcohol; this was standard procedure during a Critical Incident Investigation. Their guns were collected, placed in an evidence bag and locked in a safe at the station. Their hands were swabbed for GSR testing – gunshot residue – to determine with certainty who had fired their weapons. And as the night continued they were each interviewed by members of the Critical Incident Investigation Team for their version of what happened, their stories all pivoting on the same sequence of events: they had walked into the car park and shots were fired a few seconds later. Some saw a muzzle flash. Some heard five shots while others heard a dozen – the cavernous space and concrete walls could make one bullet sound like three. No one knew who had fired first, but many suspected it was Nguyen, the man with the gun. For some officers, these interviews ended as the sun was coming up on a new morning. Standing by as they emerged from the interview room were members of the MEOCS Highway Patrol, volunteering, insisting, that they shuttle each officer home once their statements were complete. It didn’t matter if they lived in Coogee or Windsor, they got home in a MEOCS car, stopping for McDonald’s along the way.

  Nguyen, a harmless-looking figure with a slouch and receding grey hair, seemed to lie repeatedly during his three-hour interview, telling detectives he had been unarmed during the gunfight and hadn’t actually fired any shots. He said he was in the car park smoking heroin with a friend, Hawkie, when he heard shouting and saw several men with guns approaching. He thought it was a robbery. He’d been robbed a couple of weeks earlier, but the story of how that happened seemed to change depending on who was hearing it. He told the detectives his earlier assailants had come at him with knives, but to his ex-wife he’d said they had cricket bats. She and her two children were in separate rooms giving their own statements to police.

  A detective asked Nguyen what type of guns he’d seen the police holding and he responded that the two men closest to him – Roberts and Crews – each had a weapon. One of them, he said, was holding a very big gun but had dropped it to the floor, allowing him to pick it up, hoist it to his shoulder and fire it like a bazooka to force their retreat. The gun didn’t fire, but the men backed off, he said.

  ‘So you say that you pointed the gun at those people?’ the detective asked.

  ‘Yeah, yes,’ Nguyen replied. He was talking about Roberts’s battering ram.

  Another tactic he’d tried was to point his fingers into a gun shape and use that to try to scare off the men, he said. By then Sheehy’s team had an overwhelming number of statements indicating Nguyen had genuinely fired at Constable William Crews. Nguyen’s stepson had given a statement indicating that once the gunfight was over, Nguyen had raced into the apartment with Hawkie and said, ‘I shot someone who was breaking into garage. I think I killed him.’ Coupled with the corroborating statements of nearly a dozen police officers, by sunrise Nguyen was charged as the gunman and was told he would face court on a single count of ‘shoot with intent to murder’.

  In a separate room of the station, Geehad Ghazi was giving a statement explaining his role in the basement car park that night. His account maintained that he had gone to the unit complex with his two friends in order to play cards with Nguyen. Within minutes of their arrival some gunshots had rung out, forcing them to stay quiet in their separate garage where they were waiting for a deck of cards to be brought out. Ghazi’s only concession was to reveal that he’d shown up to the card game with a gun, and that he’d hidden the weapon once he heard police arrive at the scene. Tests later revealed that the firearm, recovered from the armrest of a sofa, wasn’t used in the shooting, but an admission by Ghazi that he’d tested the weapon at his house in Chester Hill would see him charged with possession. Neither of the two other men found in garage number 8 co-operated with police that night.

  Nguyen would later tell police that he and Tan Hung Chung (Hawkie) went to the garage that night to smoke heroin and await a drug deal. Tan Hung Chung was never charged with any offences in relation to that night. He gave evidence at the Coronial enquiry confirming he was in the garage and was a witness to the shooting.

  Mick Ryan was one of the last people to leave the station, staying back with Deb Wallace, the Squad’s commander, until about 6am. She had watched him closely through the night and could see him bottling up what had happened. Governed by the rules of due process, there was little she could say or do for him except be there if he needed it. She stayed until long after everyone had left and until Ryan finally decided to sign off.

  He left Bankstown and drove east, stopping at a swimming pool for a few laps, a 6am ritual he had gotten himself into each morning before work. He figured some exercise would be a release after the events of that night – storm clouds were gathering in his mind and it would be a way to zone out in the focused concentration of each lap. He pushed off the wall, but the relief was only temporary. The race was rigged; no one can outrun a storm. Halfway through a lap he stopped and got out of the water with red eyes, the events of the night catching up with him. As he found out, you can’t cry and swim at the same time. He got dressed, walked to his car and drove himself home, defeated.

  Deb Wallace tried to calm tensions during a debriefing session that morning with staff. They were enraged about the loss of their colleague. Details of the critical incident were scant and most of the officers had been misinformed about the circumstances, unaware of Nguyen’s role. They thought that the Middle Eastern men in the garage had somehow instigated the violence, an act of war. The few people aware of the real story, such as Wallace, were not allowed to discuss it.

  Riled up, demanding action, some officers suggested turning up at Geehad Ghazi’s court appearance on the gun possession charge as a show of force. Wallace was firmly against it. She urged cool heads. ‘We don’t want to look like vigilantes,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to do this emotional outburst.’

  The atmosphere grew tense as the merits of the gesture were argued. Wallace stayed firm. An officer asked if she was making an order. Wallace was shocked that someone would even ask.

  ‘Just think about what you’re saying,’ she insisted. ‘We’re in a process of raw emotion.’

  Among the officers listening was Detective Sergeant Brad Abdy, the officer who had been investigating the shooting of Fadi Ibrahim. He felt a compulsion to intervene. ‘This isn’t how we do things. Where you will show respect to Bill is to go out and do what he loved,’ Abdy said, referring to proactive, diligent police work. ‘Want to show some force? Then double-down on work: jack up some dealers, raid some houses, tip over a few cars, show people what happens when shots are fired at police.’
His words silenced the room. That night, he stood watch as three high-risk warrants were executed on an organised crime family at Merrylands, each one planned ahead before the events at Cairds Avenue, but brought forward in response, a small salute for a fallen colleague.

  The post-mortem determined the cause of death had been a single gunshot wound to the neck. Nguyen’s weapon, which had also jammed, was a .22-calibre handgun found at the bottom of a hot water tank on his balcony, but the bullet and jacketing recovered by forensic pathologist Stephen Wills were consistent with a police-issue Glock .40-calibre round. The finding confirmed that the fatal bullet had not been fired by Nguyen, but by Roberts – the shot squeezed off in the split second as he dropped his battering ram and turned to take cover behind a wall of the car park.

  The news, which until then had been all but confirmed, was delivered to Roberts later that afternoon at his home. A car pulled up outside just as Roberts approached his front gate. Deb Wallace stepped out of the car with Peter Cotter, the commander of the Homicide Squad. With them was Pamela Young, a senior investigations co-ordinator at the Homicide Squad.

  Roberts had been heading up to his local church to find a quiet space for reflection. He was on about three hours of medically induced sleep and had a bandage around his right hand. His knuckles had split open after he’d punched walls in the car park. Two friends were standing next to him for support.

  Visits had been taking place throughout the day and slowly Roberts had learned of a few facts in the case. He knew that Crews had passed away from his injuries. He knew that Nguyen was still alive, untouched by any gunfire, which meant the bullet he’d fired had missed its target. In Roberts’s mind, that gave rise to a prospect too painful to say out loud. All he could do was hope, and now pray, that his bullet had hit a wall, a car, or anything else in the garage. Cotter delivered the post-mortem findings in the living room. Wallace had to repeat them for Roberts because they didn’t sink in at first. But when they did, the words wandered through him like an illness, causing a harm that can’t be done with a physical wound. From that point forward, Roberts – an indestructible figure at MEOCS, a leader of men – was changed forever.