Detective Superintendent Lee Morgan can remember exactly where he was when the first triple-0 call came in, at dusk on June 4, 2019.
"We get countless reports of shots fired that turn out to be fireworks," he recalled.
"The first assessment was, it's the middle of Darwin, who's letting off rounds?"
But within about 30 seconds, the phone lines to Darwin's emergency communications centre were lighting up with calls from the city centre.
And it wasn't fireworks.
Instead, it was the start of a terrifying drug-fuelled shooting spree being carried out by parolee, Benjamin Glen Hoffmann, which culminated yesterday with the 48-year-old being sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.
In the emergency call centre at police headquarters, 15 kilometres from the city, then-Duty Superintendent Lee Morgan and his colleague, Watch Commander Bruce Payne, directed every available officer to the centre of the carnage.
"Very quickly we realised the offender wasn't in one position, he was moving around," recalled Detective Superintendent Morgan.
"Unfortunately, by the time we got most of our people into the area, we were receiving calls that the offender was in another location."
Despite having more than twenty years of policing in the Northern Territory under his belt, Detective Superintendent Morgan was thinking on his feet.
"There's no playbook for this," he said.
"It was pretty scary. It was nothing I had ever had to deal with before and hopefully never will again. At the front of your mind is 'how are we going to resolve this? How are we going to keep the community safe?'"
Within about 10 minutes of the first report of gunfire, police became aware at least one person had died.
'There's somebody out there killing people'
33-year-old Hassan Baydoun, a taxi driver who lived at the Palms Motel, was on a break from work when he was shot and killed by Hoffmann.
"That changed the situation again, it changes the way you think," Detective Superintendent Morgan said.
"It hits home very quickly that there's somebody out there killing people and it's your responsibility to solve it.
"[I was] in a position where potentially, I'm going to send my own people into a situation they might not come out of, and that's really hard to do," he said.
Within the next hour, Benjamin Hoffmann made his way to several different locations across the city – killing another three people.
Nigel Hellings, 75, was shot and killed at his home in The Gardens.
Hoffmann's former colleague, Michael Sisois, was shot in the car park of the Buff Club.
With police just seconds behind him at this point, Hoffmann left the city centre and took the life of Robert Courtney, in a bloody and frenzied attack in the inner suburb of Woolner.
"The process of somebody picking up the phone and calling the communications centre and somebody taking down that information, putting it into the system and then sharing that; you're always a couple of minutes behind," Detective Superintendent Morgan said.
Later, Hoffmann was captured on CCTV just metres from Detective Superintendent Morgan and his team. However, police had no idea until hours later.
Covered in blood and clutching a shotgun, Hoffmann took himself to the doors of police headquarters.
He since argued in court he was attempting to turn himself in, and Detective Superintendent Morgan believes him, because minutes later, the officer was on the phone to the killer himself.
Taking a call from a killer
Hoffmann's chaotic call to triple-0, made as he drove back towards the city, was played to the jury during his trial in 2021.
"Hey Ben, my name's Lee. How are you, mate?"
"Mate, where can I meet you? I'm f****d."
Detective Superintendent Morgan had not heard the audio of the phone call until he was sitting in the witness box, giving evidence at Hoffmann's murder trial.
"It was hard to listen to," he said.
On the call, the officer was heard calmly encouraging the killer to turn himself in.
"The first thing [I was thinking] was to keep him on the phone, because while he's talking to me, he wasn't killing anyone," Detective Superintendent Morgan recalled.
"Ben was already panicked; he was in a heightened state, he was scared. I needed to calm him down and there was no way I was going to calm him down if I was panicked, nervous or aggressive on the phone."
He said the goal was to keep Hoffmann on the phone until he was taken into custody.
Eventually, over the entire police radio network, Constable Michael Kent could be heard pulling Hoffmann over at the main intersection into the CBD.
"I will guard you with my life," the officer assured Hoffmann, as he calmly coaxed him out of the car.
Tactical police pounced seconds later and the mass shooting was over.
'Four people died on my watch'
Three years after taking the triple-0 call, Detective Superintendent Morgan choked up as he recounted the decisions he made that night.
"A lot of people did a lot of good work that night, the frontline members, the call takers. I played my role but four people still died," he said.
"That's four families who had to bury loved ones … and to know that happened on your watch, that's really hard to process and it was hard to listen to."
Since Hoffmann's murderous rampage — the biggest mass shooting the Northern Territory had seen in decades — the 49-year-old killer has finally been sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole.
Detective Superintendent Lee Morgan has been promoted and moved on to other roles.
But every year in early June, he checks in with colleague Bruce Payne, who stood next to him when the first calls came in.
"In hindsight there's always things you could do differently. Would it have changed anything? I don't know. It was impossible to control. It's something that I often think about but there's no easy answers," he said.
"Occasionally, randomly, I'll be driving or I'll be at home and it'll pop into my head. You have to accept it for what it is. We did what we could. I think we probably prevented further people dying, or I hope we did.
"It's hard to think about. But I was in the safety of an office, I had officers on the frontline who were going to put their lives on the line. Whilst I may have been ... giving directions, I was never in harm's way, so my mind often turns to how those members are coping with it and what they were faced with that night."
If it happened again, today
The Northern Territory Coroner has yet to announce a coronial inquest into the shooting and it's unclear whether she will hold one at all.
NT Police launched an independent review into the shooting, the final results of which have not been made public.
But at the Northern Territory Police Association's annual conference in August 2019, Assistant Commissioner Michael Murphy said the force's response times were "comparable to anywhere else in the world".
"Our officers responded in accordance with knowledge, experience and training," he said.
One important change, Detective Superintendent Morgan noted in the wake of the shooting, was the introduction of a permanent intelligence officer in the communications centre.
"I reckon it was about halfway through [the shooting] someone, somehow, heard Ben Hoffmann's name mentioned. At the time, the name didn't mean anything to me, I'd never dealt with Ben before, and we weren't in a position where we had a person standing around doing nothing that we could go and say, 'right go research who Ben Hoffmann is' – everybody was busy," he said.
"We now have an intelligence person embedded in the call centre 24 hours a day. Had we had that person there on that time as soon as we had that name, somebody could have been researching."
The families that Hoffmann tore apart that night, and the surviving victims he left traumatised, will carry his crimes with them forever.
For Detective Superintendent Morgan, June 4, 2019, is a night at work he tries not to think about too often.
But when he does, it will now be with the knowledge that Hoffmann will never walk the streets of Darwin again.
