The Northern Territory coroner is currently investigating the deaths of four Aboriginal women killed by their partners. One of these women, Kumanjayi Haywood, made seven triple-0 calls in one night seeking help from emergency services. However, police did not visit her until 12 hours later, around six weeks before she was killed by her partner. The coroner has heard audio recordings of these calls, which reveal the harrowing details of Ms Haywood’s situation.
First Call for Help
In the first call to triple-0, made by Kumanjayi Haywood from a pay phone, she was heard crying and telling the call-taker that Kumanjayi Dixon was threatening to kill her with broken glass at a house in Haasts Bluff, 200 kilometres from Alice Springs. Ms Haywood made the triple-0 calls from Haasts Bluff.
“Please help me right now … I’ll be dead in one minute,” Ms Haywood said.
A series of questions from the call-taker yielded limited specific details from Ms Haywood, who repeated, through tears, her desperate calls for police assistance.
After several repeated questions from the call-taker, Ms Haywood said “forget about it then”.
Repeated Calls for Help
In four other calls made by Ms Haywood that night, she again told the emergency call centre that her partner was threatening to kill her.
“Please help me … [he has] got a warrant,” she said in one.
“Can you send the policeman please?” she said in another.
Ms Haywood explained in another call that her partner had been jailed in 2017 for stabbing her.
The call-taker asked: “How come you stayed there?”
“Love is love, you know,” Ms Haywood said.
“You still love him?” the call-taker asked.
“I don’t know, in my heart. Part of my heart,” Ms Haywood said.
Final Call for Help
In her fifth and final call for the night, Ms Haywood told the emergency call-taker: “I waited for police to come but they never come … do you want my dead body to be here? I don’t want to die.”
The call centre supervisor later took over the call, telling Ms Haywood there were no police in Haasts Bluff that night and the nearest officers, in Papunya – a 45-minute drive away – were on call for emergencies.
“Nothing’s happening right now, you’ve been calling us for at least an hour,” the call-taker said.
The inquest in Alice Springs is examining the domestic violence deaths of four Aboriginal women.
Language Barriers
Ms Haywood’s mother also called emergency services twice on the same night, asking for help for her daughter.
The coroner heard there were language barriers between Ms Haywood’s mother and the call-taker, which meant it took more than seven minutes for emergency services to clarify that she was asking for police to be sent to the Haasts Bluff community.
Police Response
The court was shown police body-worn camera footage of Papunya officers visiting Ms Haywood in Haasts Bluff later that day, around 12 hours after the first emergency call.
Initially, Ms Haywood refused to give a statement about her calls for help and Mr Dixon’s threats against her.
Police then informed Ms Haywood there was an active warrant for her arrest and that she would be taken to Alice Springs.
“Our intentions were to prioritise the domestic violence [call out] … but we’d exhausted the inquiries to locate [Mr Dixon],” Constable Robert Stephenson, one of two officers who attended, told the court.
The coroner heard there was a chance that police had earlier spoken to Mr Dixon, without realising that was him, as the man they had spoken to gave officers a different name. Ms Haywood was taken by police to Alice Springs women’s shelter after her arrest.
Impact on Victims
The coroner highlighted the “impact it must have” on victims to make such calls to police.
“I just wonder what impact that has on a victim … to have police arrest someone with that terrible background and then to have him back in her house the next night and for there to be no response when she calls police,” Judge Armitage said.
“We ask a lot of victims and complainants, but how do we really expect them to continue to put themselves at risk by making phone calls to police that are overheard by their partners, when it seems [there’s] so little we can do to protect them.”
Conclusion
The inquest into the deaths of four Aboriginal women killed by their partners is ongoing. The case of Kumanjayi Haywood highlights the urgent need for better responses to domestic and family violence in the Northern Territory. The language barriers faced by Ms Haywood’s mother and the delayed police response to Ms Haywood’s calls for help demonstrate the systemic issues that need to be addressed. It is crucial that victims of domestic and family violence receive the support they need to escape violent situations and that perpetrators are held accountable for their actions.