by Yoni Bashan
Roberts provided his statement to the Critical Incident Investigative Team the next day, an interview that canvassed everything that had happened leading up to the shooting – from his meeting with the original informant who had led them to the building, to the preparation of the search warrant’s paperwork, to the moments following the gunfire. Roberts’s memory was hazy. He could remember seeing the open garage door and hearing someone yell out. Nguyen fired first, he said. The sequence of shots wasn’t clear, but the gun was going everywhere and it looked like he was squeezing the trigger several times.
‘How many shots did you fire?’ Detective Joe Doueihi asked.
‘I fired one shot,’ Roberts said. He tried to answer more of Doueihi’s questions but the trauma had erased part of his memory. He still had a walk-through of the crime scene to complete, which would take several more hours. Doueihi suggested they pick up the interview at another time. He asked Roberts if there was anything he wanted to add, and Roberts thought about it for a moment. Then he spoke. There was a reality about the situation that people were only partially acknowledging.
‘We were being shot at,’ he said.
Police officers and emergency service personnel packed St Andrews Cathedral in Sydney six days later for Crews’s state funeral. Hundreds of ordinary citizens turned out to pay their respects. Some watched from their office towers as the funeral procession made its way down George Street. Inside the church, Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione spoke at length to mourners and described Constable William Arthur George Crews as being on a rapid upward ascent before his life was tragically cut short. His recruitment to the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad was testament to this promise.
At the end of his speech, Scipione announced that Crews had been promoted to the rank of Detective, a designation he had been working towards at the time of the incident, and posthumously awarded the prestigious Police Commissioner’s Valour Award for ‘conspicuous merit and exceptional bravery’ in the line of duty. By then it had become clear to investigators that Crews had not only moved towards the line of fire, but that he had also advanced into it as he was being shot.
It took almost four years before the Critical Incident Investigation Team’s findings could be delivered to the NSW Coroner in May 2014. Nguyen’s criminal proceedings had to play out first before the coroner’s inquest could begin. Detective Inspector Mick Sheehy concluded in his 72-page report that both Crews and Roberts had been within their rights to fire back at Nguyen. He ultimately found that Detective Constable Crews’s death had been caused as a result of a ‘tragically misdirected’ bullet.
Sheehy could not say with certainty how this had occurred, but spent a considerable amount of time examining Crews’s service weapon and the position of his body on the ground. He found that Crews had fallen away from Nguyen’s garage at the time he was shot, which tended to support the hypothesis that he may have turned to take cover as his gun failed and ‘in doing so stepped into the line of fire’.
The question of why his gun had jammed at all became a separate line of enquiry to the Critical Incident Investigation, one that saw Sheehy speak with the weapon’s manufacturers. Studies of Crews’s Glock had shown that its fourth bullet had entered the chamber backwards, making it inoperable. How this happened couldn’t be determined with certainty, but Sheehy believed the most likely scenario was that the bullet had been loaded backwards into the magazine.
The weapon’s manufacturer said that wasn’t possible – the Glock magazine would not allow bullets to be loaded the wrong way around. Several ballistic tests were conducted and, in some cases, it was possible in Glock magazines with significant wear.
Sheehy’s investigation conducted acoustic testing of the crime scene and reconstructions of the incident in order to confirm that Nguyen had fired his weapon first. Both the Coroner and the Counsel Assisting the Coroner were also brought to the building and shown its structure. They, too, got disorientated as they tried to navigate its staircases and doorways.
While Sheehy’s report exonerated Roberts and his team of any wrongdoing in the preparation of the warrant and the incident itself, the NSW Coroner found there was still cause to suspect the officers should have prepared for a possible gun on the premises. This was based on the notes taken down by Detective McNally in the back of the police car hours earlier when he wrote the word ‘gun’ and struck a line beneath it. While McNally maintained it was done for no other reason than to remind himself that questions about firearms had been asked, the Coroner instead chose to give more weight to the informant’s account of the conversation, a version of which was provided to Sheehy’s investigative team. The informant, whose name and gender cannot be identified, told Sheehy’s detectives that the word ‘ammo’ had been mentioned in the car. Asked what that meant, the informant said ‘ammo’ meant a firearm. This account was flatly denied by Roberts and McNally and discounted by Sheehy in his final report, whose findings were backed by both the NSW Supreme Court in the Crown’s case against Nguyen and, later, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.
In doubting McNally, a sworn police officer, and accepting the evidence of the informant, a documented liar, the coroner seemed to suggest the TAG officers wanted to hide or ignore the fact that a gun might be on the premises that night in order to get their warrant approved. But this makes no sense. If the goal of both Roberts and McNally had been to raid the unit block as quickly as possible – a fact clearly accepted by the coroner during the inquest – then any hint of a gun would have only ramped up the urgency of their warrant and expedited its execution. In other words, had there been suggestions of a gun the incentive was there to highlight and maximise them. By ignoring or overlooking these suggestions, as the coroner seemed to suggest, the officers would have only been doing themselves a disservice. They also would have been diverging from years of precedent they had helped set. A cursory check of past Operational Orders filled out at MEOCS, particularly those completed by Dave Roberts, would have turned up scores of examples where firearms were clearly flagged in advance.
Included among these examples would be the arrest of Remeh Ghazi, an Auburn crime figure, on 11 November 2009. Remeh’s Union Road home was searched on the suspicion he was harbouring a firearm, the risk printed in detail on the opening page of the Operational Orders. The raid ended up yielding the gun plus 156 rounds of ammunition. As it turned out, it was Ghazi’s brother, Geehad, who was found hiding in the basement car park during the Cairds Avenue shooting. So why would the risk have been amplified in one case and not the other? Or in the countless other MEOCS raids seeking to recover weapons? Wouldn’t the raid on Cairds Avenue, Bankstown, conform to the same standards if the possibility of a gun was present?
To anyone familiar with the nuances of the case, this is not a divisive issue. Despite the coroner’s findings, the overwhelming view is that neither Roberts nor McNally were ever told about any gun or ‘ammo’ on the premises at Bankstown that night.
Sheehy’s report made several policy recommendations to the NSW Police Force, among them being that all officers attached to MEOCS and other specialist squads should receive formal tactical training for search warrant entries. It was a finding that seemed to support what many in the Squad had been pushing for since its inception. For years they had been flying blind in some ways, particularly those in the Target Action Group, whose bread-and-butter work was to raid houses.
One of the few aspects of the warrant preparation that Sheehy criticised was the Risk Assessment process, which he found was not completed correctly. This was due in part to a lack of training and a misunderstanding about how to grade the risks themselves. But, even so, his report still concluded this was a technical error only. Had everything been done properly, he found that the warrant would have been graded as a ‘moderate risk’ rather than ‘low risk’. This still, as his report noted, would have ultimately had ‘no bearing on the manner of execution’ that night.
Nguyen contested his charge of shoot with inte
nt to murder and subsequently pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter on 19 July 2012, a plea that saw him admit he’d been armed at the time of the gunfight and had shot at Detective Constable Crews, hitting him with a single bullet to his left arm. He was sentenced to a minimum term of seven years in prison, which was later revised up on appeal to a minimum of thirteen years. In May 2016 he lost a High Court challenge to this sentence. He will become eligible for parole in 2023.
Detective Senior Constable Dave Roberts returned to work within a month of the Cairds Avenue shooting, placing himself on restricted duties. The first thing he noticed when he walked back into the MEOCS office was Crews’s desk, which hadn’t been touched since the night of the incident. When Roberts loaded up his computer he found emails from Crews that he’d forgotten about, messages exchanged between them in the hours leading up to the search warrant. Staring at the screen, he weighed up whether or not to delete them. They were painful reminders.
It took another four years before he could bring himself to do it.
For a long time, grief was a prism through which he viewed the world. Questions, impossible questions, about that night would trigger mentally exhausting spirals. What if I’d aimed higher? What if I hadn’t fired at all? What if the bullet had been two millimetres to the right? Should I have fired in the first place?
There were panic attacks, something he had never experienced before. They came on suddenly and with the force of a heart attack. Prescription medication, something he had never needed before, became a crutch to get to sleep at night. Poker machines, something he had never even been tempted to go near, suddenly dominated his days. Weeks were lost pushing fifties into slot machines and he barely cared about the winnings. Thousands of dollars were lost. ‘It was an expensive way to numb the mind,’ Roberts said later in an interview.
Running parallel to his private grief was the public scrutiny into what had happened. The Cairds Avenue warrant had cast a pall over his career and reputation. Never mind that a year earlier he was Roberts the machine, the decorated police officer, one of the most exceptional cops in the TAG office who had been personally responsible for generating thirty search warrants, 214 arrests and the charging of 119 people. Now, there were clumsy, careless headlines. Journalists incorrectly described the raid as a ‘botched’ operation, hinting that it was sloppily prepared and suggesting cowboy behaviour.
Sometime during 2011, a few months after the tragedy, Roberts returned to the basement garage with three police colleagues. They were people he trusted to give him a brutally honest assessment of what happened that night. Together, as a group, they recreated the event, step by step, an unofficial account of the lead-up and a breakdown of what had occurred when the shots were fired. At that stage the Critical Incident Investigation was still many months away from handing down its official findings. Roberts needed answers. His colleagues with him in the car park mulled over the complexities, but they all arrived at the same conclusion: it was a freak event, a one in a million, a scenario so improbable that it couldn’t be replicated.
That point marked an important step for Roberts to settle the matter in his mind. He tried to put his life back together. He enrolled himself into a treatment program with The Brothers of St John of God, an organisation that assists people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. There he saw for the first time other men like him: strong, proud members of the armed forces or law enforcement organisations struggling with their own demons, struggling to admit vulnerability, struggling to ask for help when they had never needed it before.
He weaned himself off the Xanax (though he remains on other medication), gave up gambling cold turkey, and threw himself into fitness – weight lifting, swimming and amateur boxing, putting himself forward as a sparring partner for much more experienced fighters. In a way, the hits were therapeutic, he said. They were a form of catharsis; it can’t be explained.
He and other former cops suffering the same post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) would get together, pummel each other mercilessly and then hug it out when the fight was over. The hits, in a way, brought Roberts back to life. ‘You feel awake,’ he said.
Doctors told Roberts that the death of William Crews had been the precipitating factor in his PTSD. For almost a decade, criminals from Arncliffe to Guildford had been talking about him. There were threats so serious that his home had undergone fortification upgrades, giving it the appearance of a fortress – the windows were replaced with bulletproof glass and iron bars, security cameras were installed with a back-to-base alarm system, and a huge wall was erected across the front of the property. He was granted permission to take his gun home too.
There were other factors, the same litany of unacknowledged traumatic events that most police officers encounter daily, sometimes without even realising it. These are the suicides, the child sexual assaults and the near-fatal car accidents where the sight of the injuries lingers in the back of the mind for years afterwards.
In Roberts’s case this trail of damage went back to his first year in the job, to the scene of a horrific car crash. It was two in the morning and the driver had wrapped his car around a power pole. Roberts’s partner, a former paramedic, had reached into the man’s mouth to clear his airway; he was choking on his own teeth. The car’s engine had been pushed into the cabin and was crushing the man’s legs. He had a sucking chest wound – an open hole in his body. Roberts was told to put his hand on top of it to keep the air out.
Those were the big things, but there were little ones too that crept up slowly: the realisation that the world isn’t a safe place, that people can be cruel, and that some are just plain evil. Mick Ryan called this ‘the poison’.
Roberts transferred out of MEOCS and moved to a suburban command in a different part of Sydney. Friends, fellow officers and family members told him to consider a retirement package and seek out a peaceful existence elsewhere. He couldn’t do it. Sharon Crews, William’s mother, had told him before Crews’s funeral at Glen Innes that if he, or any of the other officers involved in the raid, left the NSW Police Force then it would only compound her grief.
Roberts is no longer in contact with the Crews family but still thinks about his colleague most days. Each year on 8 September, the anniversary, he visits the police memorial, looks at William Crews’s name and quietly, privately, remembers that night.
Today, despite it all, Roberts is still a serving NSW police officer.
For the rest of the Squad, it was a slow return to normalcy. Morale was low. Some officers took time off to deal with their grief. Investigations were put on hold.
To try to help her staff, Deb Wallace reached out to the Special Air Service Regiment to ask how they dealt with death when it occurred in their tightly knit teams. A senior officer told Wallace they had struggled with the same issue. ‘We’ve learned our lessons,’ the SAS officer said. ‘You have to let people grieve when they’re ready. If someone wants to be at work, let them be at work. Don’t wrap them in cotton wool; they’ll feel like they’re victims.’
Wallace kept this in mind as she kept an eye on several officers who’d been involved in the warrant. One of her biggest concerns was for Mick Ryan, who had returned to work immediately after the incident, stoic as ever. His office had been crowded with cards and flowers sent in by colleagues from across the state in condolence.
Most of the detectives tried not to speak about the incident, but the topic was sometimes inescapable. Crews’s desk was itself a reminder; it stayed untouched for months, everything left as it was with a jacket slung over the chair and pens still in the drawers. One day, without saying a word, Ryan walked over and began gathering up these personal belongings, packing the items into boxes to send home to Crews’s family. He made no announcement of the move and didn’t delegate it to anyone else. Those in the room stopped working and watched with respect, a moment of silence in a way. Today, Crews’s portrait hangs at the entrance to the MEOCS office, the first thing officers see as they walk
through the frosted glass door.
Wallace eventually took Ryan aside and told him he needed to take time off, to disengage. She expected resistance, but by then he too had come to the same conclusion. A long period of stress leave followed and in 2013 he confirmed his retirement.
Now out of the cops, aged fifty-six, his spare time is mostly taken up with working on a 34-foot flybridge cruiser. He says he doesn’t miss police work. Thirty years of dealing with criminals and seeing the worst aspects of society has left him with bitter memories. ‘It does take a while to get the poison out of your system, to stop seeing the badness in people,’ he said during one of several long interviews for this book. ‘You become very cynical.’
As a result of the tragedy at Bankstown, search warrant protocols were overhauled and replaced with strict new criteria requiring several additional layers of command approval for raids to be carried out. This course of action divided police. Some saw it as an overcorrection. They asked why procedures should be rewritten over what was, at its core, a tragic one-off occurrence. Others saw a benefit in the changes, arguing that it was a small price to pay for an added layer of safety in a job that had never been able to guarantee it.