The death in custody of a Barkindji man who was forcibly removed from his family as a child and spent his life in state institutions “brings great shame on white Australia” and highlights the role of intergenerational trauma in incarceration of Aboriginal people in custody, the New South Wales coroner has found.
Fifty-seven-year-old Kevin Bugmy died of a heart attack in Cessnock jail in April 2019. Most of his life had been spent in state institutions, from his childhood as a ward of the state to his adulthood in prison. Bugmy had a solvent abuse problem and the care he received for his chronic substance use “over many years was grossly inadequate”, deputy coroner Harriet Grahame said.
