In the hours after Gareth Train and his wife, Stacey, murdered two police officers and wounded a third during a chilling, premeditated attack on their remote Queensland property this week, they posted a haunting video to YouTube.
“They came to kill us, and we killed them,” Gareth says, his face partly obscured in darkness.
“If you don’t defend yourself against these devils and demons, you’re a coward.”
Unlike the litany of would-be manifestos posted by extremist mass shooters, though, the video did not seem intended for a wider audience. Instead, the Trains, who police say carried out the shooting on Monday night along with Gareth’s brother, Nathaniel, appeared to be speaking to an audience of one.
“We’ll see you when we get home, Don,” Gareth says at the end of the 41-second clip.
“Don”, it appears, is an Arizona-based conspiracist with whom the Trains had struck up an online friendship. Immediately after the shooting, “Don”, who uses an online moniker that the Guardian has chosen not to name, posted his own video.
“The devils came for them to kill them, and they had to kill the devils themselves and are now on the run,” he says.
“It is no different for us. The devils come for us they fucking die, it’s just that simple.”
Although both said they had never met in person, Gareth Train and “Don” repeatedly refer to one another as “brothers” in online posts seen by the Guardian. Videos and posts made by the men betray similar preoccupations: an apparent hatred of police, fundamentalist Christian ideology, and a loose connection to beliefs linked to the so-called sovereign citizen conspiracy movement.
“My brother and I have been out-numbered by the wicked and ask our Father to set fire to the cities and towns and call out to our Brother Yeshua to return,” Gareth Train writes in one post, referring to “Don” and his wife, “Annie”.
The cross-border relationship also offered an eerie insight into the paranoia that both couples appear to have been gripped by in the lead-up to the shooting. In a video posted less than a week before, “Don” lays out a conspiracy-laden narrative borrowing from the far-right “great reset” theory which predicts a coming end-days scenario with “enforced” vaccinations, and bans on Christianity, “freedom” and “private property”.
He states people like himself and the Trains would resist “no matter [the] cost” including “running and gunning with bounties on our heads … whether we survive this or not”.
In a comment on a video of “Don’s” on 7 December, Stacey Train remarks: “Our Heavenly Father chose us for this time – what a privilege. Daniel and I are looking forward to going Home. We’ll see you when we get there, our dear brother and sister.”
Gareth and Nathaniel Train had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian household and the former regularly posted on conspiracist websites during the pandemic. But the videos posted by Gareth and Stacey Train, first revealed by the independent website Crikey on Friday, provided new insights into the perpetrators of one of the worst acts of violence against police in recent Australian history.
“They have to kill us. They have to kill us because they can’t break our spirit,” Gareth says, his voice modified, in one video posted about a month before the shooting.
In another, he names several police officers in both Queensland and NSW, and appears to refer to a visit that he says was made to his property by police in the lead-up to the shooting.
In one comment which appears to have been written by Stacey Train – who had previously been married to Nathaniel – she refers to recent “welfare checks” made by officers at their property, saying “these fools are stepping into a world of hurt they know nothing of”.
The two slain officers had been part of a group of four responding to a routine missing person’s report for Nathaniel, a former school principal who had last been in contact with his family on 9 October. A neighbour was also killed when he came to investigate the commotion. Police have likened the shooting to an ambush, and are investigating whether the call-out to the property may have been an intentional lure set by the two men and Stacey Train.
Asked this week whether the family was known to police prior to the shooting, police commissioner Katarina Carroll said the answer was “complex”.
But conversations between the Trains and “Don” in the days before the shooting reveal an apparent escalation in the couple’s paranoia. Gareth refers to “covert agents and tactics for some time now”, writing “our Father is giving up a clear sign”.
“Monsters and their heads are soon parted,” he says.
“Don” replies that he and his wife are also “settled on this matter” and “it is time”. It is not clear from the conversation what matter “Don” is referring to when he says “it is time”.
On another video he says: “We teach those fuckers how we are to be treated … They are just too blood damn retarded to know whom they should leave be … Ah, the grand adventure builds steam.”
In their final video, shrouded in darkness, Stacey Train tells “Don” they will “be home soon” and that they love him.
