Grieving mother Sharon Moore has spoken out about failures in NSW Police's investigation of her teenage daughter's death.
Indigenous Australian readers are advised this article contains images of a dead person, which their family permitted.
Seventeen-year-old Charli Powell died in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, on February 11, 2019.
Ms Moore said she had not been alone in her grief since her daughter's death.
“I guess you don’t really know how loved you are until you’re not here anymore — and I was blown away by the amount of people who contacted me after she passed,” Ms Moore said.
"As soon as I open my eyes up, I realise that she's not there, and you've got to spend the whole day getting to a point where you can function — and then you go to sleep and you've got to start again. It's hard."
She has chosen to raise her concerns publicly about shortcomings in the police investigation in the wake of her daughter's suicide.
"I don't want another family to ever have to feel like I have all the way through this process," she said.
"I'm not going to give up the fight."
'Go home, have a cup of tea'
In evidence given to the inquest, Ms Powell's 18-year-old boyfriend Rohan Rosewarne said he had a disagreement with her at his house, prompting her to leave, just hours before her death about 3am.
Call logs showed there were then numerous phone calls between the pair, with Rosewarne telling the court Ms Powell had told him where she was at a public toilet block and intended to kill herself.
The court heard he arrived at the toilets and found her unresponsive, then sought help from a nearby resident and called triple zero.
The inquest found the officer who responded, NSW Police Senior Constable Emma Tubman, approached Rosewarne, knowing there was a warrant out for his arrest.
At the time of Ms Powell's death, he was facing charges of assaulting her just across the border, in the ACT.
Senior Constable Tubman said she used discretion and decided not to arrest or interview Rosewarne, because he was "extremely upset".
"Due to his state, I said: 'Go home, have a cup of tea, coffee, get physically sorted out and then come back to the police station,'" she said.
Rosewarne did not present to the police station.
His assault charges were due to be heard in the Magistrates Court that same month but, after Ms Powell's death, the matter was never heard.
Queanbeyan police officers eventually interviewed Rosewarne more than eight months later, but only because he was already in custody for another matter.
In her findings, the coroner, Harriet Grahame, found the police interview had been botched.
"[The interview] occurred in an ad hoc manner, without preparation, when [Rosewarne] had been using drugs, and was facing considerable jail time for unrelated offences," Magistrate Grahame said.
The lack of a timely interview meant "no immediate or detailed account was taken from the only person who had been with Charli in the period just prior to her death".
Rosewarne was later sentenced in 2021 to 10 years in prison in the ACT for aggravated burglary, theft, arson and assaulting a police officer.
Queanbeyan lawyer Michael Bartlett, who represented Ms Powell's mother at the inquest, raised his serious concerns about the police investigation.
"When I was young I was a policeman and, when a 17-year-old girl dies, it's serious," Mr Bartlett said.
"But from what I can work out from the brief of evidence, this matter was written off as a suicide before the police even arrived.
"All [the police] had to do were the basic questions of investigation: 'What? When? Where? Who? How?'
"They didn't even [do] a proper interview with him at the time. He was wanted on a warrant and they released him almost immediately. I mean, you just shake your head."
Mr Bartlett and Ms Moore had hoped the coroner would make an open finding in the inquest.
However, Magistrate Grahame said her finding that the teenager had killed herself relied heavily on a post-mortem examination.
That examination found no evidence of defensive wounds and supported the likelihood that Ms Powell's death was self-inflicted.
"I understand that Charli's family will be disappointed, and possibly angered, by [the finding of suicide], and I am sorry to exacerbate the grief they are already suffering," Magistrate Grahame said.
Mr Bartlett and Ms Moore have lamented that their only avenue to have the coroner's findings overturned would be to go to the NSW Supreme Court.
'The beatings were nearly daily'
Ms Moore said over the course of her daughter's two-year relationship with Rosewarne, she had tried to seek help for domestic violence at the Queanbeyan Police Station.
But Ms Moore said she believed her daughter had been dismissed, either due to racism or a failure to take domestic violence complaints seriously.
"There was no knock at my door to say 'this was going on with your daughter'. She was a kid, you know? And where was [the police officer's] duty of care? They never brought her home to me, not once," Ms Moore said.
"It was getting to the point where the beatings were nearly daily."
In her findings, Magistrate Grahame found the weight of evidence suggested Rosewarne had threatened his girlfriend and was physically violent to her.
"In my view, that violence would have been a stressor for her and is likely to have contributed to her state of mind around the time of her death," she said.
"Her death may well have been an impulsive act, but she had been subjected to significant verbal and physical abuse in the months before she took her own life."
Ms Moore said she had been left frustrated by her conversations with police, who left the impression with her that officers blamed women for not leaving violent relationships.
She said she wanted to see laws strengthened to better address domestic violence.
"If there's a death, it should be looked at in a different way. It should be investigated a lot harder than what they have certainly done with Charli," she said.
"Charli wanted to end the relationship. Not end her own life."
NSW Police did not respond to a request for an interview and did not reply to questions from the ABC.
