A New South Wales police officer has told an inquest into the drowning death of a Gomeroi man that the river conditions were “extremely dangerous”, but agreed police officers should have initially searched for longer.
Constable Katerina Hinton, a probationary constable with Moree police, told the court that she had less than three months’ experience in the job and the effort was her first search and rescue.
Hinton told the inquest she had thought she was searching for up to 30 or 40 minutes, but the court was told it was no more than 13 minutes.
Counsel assisting the coroner, Peggy Dwyer, asked Hinton: “Do you think that police should have spent longer there at the riverside looking for him?”
Hinton: “Upon reflection? Yes.”
Hinton was also asked by Dwyer about her body-worn camera. Hinton conceded she had failed to turn on the device during the search.
The NSW coroner is examining the circumstances surrounding the death of Gordon Copeland, who drowned in the Gwydir river in the early hours of the morning on 10 July 2021.
Copeland, a Gomeroi man and father of three, went into the swollen river after police followed the vehicle in which he was a passenger, mistakenly thinking it was stolen.
“We had searched that river for what I now know to have been 12 or 13 minutes,” Hinton told the court.
She said she had assisted in the search along with two other officers on the riverbank and said the conditions were extremely rough in the pitch blackness with only their torches for visibility.
“The current was flowing incredibly quickly, there was a lot of debris, there was lots of banging and crashing, it was quite loud as well,” Hinton said.
She said she had not yet known if Copeland was struggling to survive in the rough conditions but said she heard officers calling out with no response.
“If somebody was potentially in that river they may have found it incredibly difficult to swim, I believe even a strong swimmer may have struggled in that circumstance,” she said.
Hinton was questioned by Dwyer about the perceived “joviality and a lack of urgency” among officers in body-worn camera vision shown to the court. Hinton said the officers did not believe anyone was in the water at that time.
“I believe that if someone needed our help they would have let us know that they needed our help. Our job is to protect life and property – we would have been willing to protect that person’s life,” Hinton said after becoming emotional and crying.
When questioned by Dwyer about whether the rough conditions, darkness, swollen river, strong currents and debris, along with a potential injury after falling into the river, may have made it difficult for Copeland to call for help, Hinton said she wasn’t thinking about “at the time”.
The junior officer failed to turn on her body-worn camera during the incident. Hinton did not take notes during the initial search about when emergency and further search and rescue arrived. She admitted to the court that she should have done so.
“I was quite junior at that time, I had a lot of things going on in my mind … I was so junior at the time and had never been in any situation like this before, so it was all quite unknown to me,” Hinton said.
Hinton said no debriefing had yet occurred, and told the inquest that more training and resources would be helpful to ensure junior officers knew what to do in a similar event.
‘’Stronger torches that would have allowed more visibility, some sort of night vision or heat source camera would have allowed us to see better at the night-time,” she told the court.
Police called off the search after three days, but Copeland’s family and friends continued searching for months.
Following sustained community pressure, authorities reopened the search in October 2021 and found his body after three days, less than 500 metres from where he entered the water.
The inquest is expected to hear from other officers as well as friends of Copeland who were with him shortly before he went into the river.
In a statement read out to the court, Copeland’s mother, Narelle, said the family had been threatened with fines for breaching Covid restrictions if they continued searching for him after the official search was called off.
“It was really difficult to search because of Covid restrictions,” the statement said. “The police were threatening to fine us for searching, they were following us.”
The statement said the family had to seek an exemption from the rules “so they would stop threatening us”.
Constable Joshua Jones, who testified on Wednesday, agreed when asked by Dwyer that the family should have been able to continue their unofficial search.
Jones agreed with Hinton that more training and equipment was needed for officers who were required to conduct search and rescue operations.
The inquest heard that Jones had been in Moree as a junior officer for just a few weeks before Copeland’s death.
