“It was really hard for me to hear police say ‘choke him out’,” says Dr Raelene Nixon, reflecting on the death of her son in police custody. “That would have been the last thing Steven would have heard.
“It’s heartbreaking when you’re the parent of somebody that you love so much, to know that was the way his life ended. He died in one of the most violent, atrocious ways that any 27-year-old could die.
“That was my precious heart, my firstborn son, who you love with everything that you have.”
Steven Nixon-McKellar, 27, died in October 2021 after a struggle with police outside his cousin’s home in Toowoomba after an officer used a now-banned chokehold while arresting him.
But the family say they had to wait almost five hours for official confirmation that he had died – and ended up finding out from relatives who shared the police statement via Facebook.
An inquest into Nixon-McKellar’s death is set down for September in Toowoomba. At a preliminary hearing in May, the coroner heard that during the incident, which was recorded on body worn cameras, one officer is heard telling another to “choke this cunt out, choke him out” shortly before Nixon-McKellar died.
Queensland police banned the use of lateral vascular neck restraint (LVNR) during arrests shortly after his death.
Nixon-McKellar’s mother says her son struggled with mental health much of his adult life and was sick with asthma at the time of the incident. An autopsy found he was also suffering from undiagnosed pneumonia.
Police say that on 7 October they received after an anonymous tip-off that Nixon-McKellar was in possession of a stolen car and went to investigate. After arriving at the home of Nixon’s cousin, there was a violent altercation and officers called for urgent assistance. A third officer applied the chokehold to Nixon-McKellar, who they say then stopped resisting.
“I wanted to see the footage because [police said] there was a violent altercation and they were indicating that Steven was the aggressor. I knew that couldn’t be the case, because I knew how sick he was,” Nixon, a lecturer in Aboriginal health at Melbourne University, says.
Counsel assisting the coroner told the preliminary hearing that an officer said: “He’s asleep, he’s asleep, let him go”. One checked for a pulse on the left side of his neck before calling for others to “start CPR, start CPR!”. Ambulance officers arrived but Nixon-McKellar could not be revived and was declared dead at the scene.
Nixon says official confirmation of his death took almost five hours, even though it happened in front of her cousin’s house and the family had tried to find out anything they could about his condition.
“This is how I found out about [the altercation]: my cousin rang my mum and said, ‘Steven’s in trouble’.
“So, I spoke to her and … I said, ‘Can you put one of the police officers on the phone so I can see what’s happened?’ And so she took the phone out and said, ‘Here I’ve got Steven’s mum on the phone’. I said, ‘Can you tell me if my son’s OK?’ And he said, ‘Well, no, he’s not’.
“At that point we thought he had been taken by ambulance to the hospital, so I said, ‘Is he going to be OK?’ And he said, ‘I can’t tell you that information, because I can’t confirm your identity’. And I said, ‘Can you tell me if my son’s still alive?’ And he said ‘I can’t give you any information. You’ll have to wait for someone from Victoria police to come around to your home.’”
Nixon says Victoria police arrived at her home almost five hours later, by which time the family had been frantically searching for answers on his condition.
“We phoned everywhere, honestly. We phoned the Toowoomba hospital, Toowoomba Aboriginal Legal Service, Toowoomba courthouse, the Toowoomba police station. Everybody was just shutting the door on us. Nobody would tell us anything.”
Eventually, Nixon says her cousin went to the police station and said: “Is he alive or is he not? His mother wants to know.”
“Just before they told him, they put out a media statement, which was sent to me via Facebook, that he had passed away. That’s how I officially found out that yes, he had died. On Facebook. By messenger on Facebook.”
Nixon says it was a week before the family could view his body.
“By the time they let my sister into the coroner’s place a week later, she said he was just sort of on the steel bed [and] was wrapped in plastic. All she could see was his head.
“They talk about death in custody, but what about the protocols around what’s supposed to happen when somebody does actually die?” Nixon says.
Her son died during the peak of the Covid pandemic while her home state of Victoria was in lockdown, so Nixon had to seek permission to enter Queensland. She organised her son’s funeral during two weeks in a Brisbane quarantine hotel.
“I really wasn’t coping well with that at all, because I’m not an alone person at the best of times, but to go through that … In the end, they allowed my niece to come and spend the second week with me, just so I had someone there to support me. She and I organised the funeral for when I got out,” Nixon says.
“One of the most traumatic things for me now is whenever I see anybody having the opportunity to say goodbye, to sit by their loved one’s side and kiss them and hug them and tell them that it’s gonna be all right. We never, ever got that opportunity. By the time I got to see him he was already in the coffin, two weeks later. We had to get a long-sleeve shirt to bury him in because after the autopsy his arms had been cut from the index finger to his armpits” she says.
Counsel assisting the coroner told the preliminary hearing that in the days prior to his death, Steven “may have exhibited a reluctance to seek meaningful medical treatment” because he was “wanted on a warrant and a mental health order”.
But lawyers for the family dispute this. Dana Levitt, of Levitt Robinson, says Nixon-McKellar’s prior criminal and medical history was relevant to the inquest only because it should have alerted police “to his special vulnerabilities as a young Indigenous male, prior to applying the LVNR”.
“The fact is, Steve Nixon was very much alive when he encountered Queensland police officers on a suburban Queensland street on 7 October 2021,” Levitt says.
“Shortly after, a third QPS officer arrives, is directed to “choke the cunt out” and does so using a chokehold known as a lateral vascular neck restraint (LVNR), from which Nixon never regains consciousness.”
Nixon says the family are planning to travel to attend the inquest in September.
“We’re hoping to hold a little, peaceful rally, in memory, as a statement, but also in memory of a lot of the people who have lost their lives through police brutality or in police custody,” she says.
“The power is in the people. And this is a really horrific thing that’s happened to our family, but it has happened to more than 500 other families, and that’s just in the last 30 years,” she says.
“I’m hoping that we can come together and say, you just can’t keep killing our kids, mums, dads, aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters. Enough is enough, and I know many people work tirelessly in this space despite the trauma they experienced. We can’t sit back and accept and tolerate this, the lives of our loved ones are gone, and no one ever held accountable. Something needs to change, and it’s not us,” she says.
