Family members were wailing, yelling and throwing themselves to the ground in Yuendumu immediately after the police shooting of Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker as they struggled to process what had happened, the inquest into his death has been told.
Local youth development worker Brooke Shanks, whose partner was related to the teenager, said those who first gathered at the house in the remote Northern Territory community where the shooting occurred were angry.
"Then there was a mixture of grief, wailing and yelling. People not knowing how to process that. People throwing themselves to the ground and people hitting themselves with rocks, Ms Shanks told the inquiry in Alice Springs on Tuesday.
"There was an overwhelming feeling of just grief and anger mixed into not knowing how to emotionally express it."
Ms Shanks said she had looked inside the building and saw the blood and gun casings on the floor and also the drag marks outside the property.
She said there were immediate rumours circling about what had occurred and how Mr Walker was, but no one really knew what actually happened.
"Trying to filter through that and also stay positive that he was getting medical treatment, it was hard," she said.
"I knew deep down seeing the drag marks myself, it wasn't good. They were very heavy, embedded into the ground. There was no struggle there.
"Deep down I already knew it was going to go south in terms of his health."
Ms Shanks told Coroner Elisabeth Armitage she was also concerned that the house had not been secured as a crime scene.
Mr Walker had been shot three times by Constable Zachary Rolfe during a botched arrest on November 9, 2019.
He died while receiving first aid at the Yuendumu police station.
Const Rolfe was subsequently charged with his murder but was acquitted after a Supreme Court trial.
Ms Shanks said she believed the community grief that stemmed from the shooting had still not been resolved, with the young men especially bottling up their emotions.
The community's trust in police had also been eroded.
In earlier evidence, she said young people traumatised by the incident had gone without proper support and counselling because of a lack of services.
While there was some assistance put in place for older community members during Const Rolfe's trial, broader funding cuts had left a "huge gap".
"A lot of the young people haven't had the opportunity to express their emotions and their feelings around the events that took place that night,' Ms Shanks said.
"There's so much trauma and complexities to a lot of young people, even prior to the events of November 2019.
"The community and the young people, in general, need support and it's not as accessible as everyone believes it is."
Ms Shanks told the inquest that all the bad publicity Yuendumu had received in recent years made it extremely difficult to fill youth support positions.
She said suitably qualified applicants were often lost to the region once Yueudumu was suggested as an option.
"They quickly withdraw their application once they Google the Yuendumu community and see what the media is portraying about it," she said.
"So then you start to settle with less qualified people which doesn't give you the outcomes the community needs."
