June 2000 Volume 81 Number 6
"serving the protectors"
| June 2000 Volume 81 Number 6 "serving the protectors" |
|
|
|
| By
Brett Williams |
Fighting Flames of SELF-DESTRUCTION
Coaxing someone out of suicide is, for police, like walking on a razor’s edge. Brett Williams looks at a mid-’90s encounter which left some police with enduring images of self-inflicted brutality.
hree SA cops faced the prospect of watching a man burn to death on an Adelaide street in January, 1995. Soaked in methylated spirit and armed with a cigarette lighter, Anthony David Casey threatened to set himself ablaze only metres from the officers outside St Andrew’s Hospital.
Constable Ian Lockwood, then a solo patrol officer, had been the first cop to arrive at the Gilles St scene. He tried to distract Casey with conversation. But, unmoved, Casey continually rolled his thumb over the lighter’s ignition mechanism - just slowly enough to prevent a spark.
Dressed in only a t-shirt and jeans, and with complete outward calm, he told the officers he did not want to talk to them.
But rather than a positive sign, that outward calm, the officers believed, was ominous. From their years’ street experience, they knew it meant Casey was most likely serious.
And as he teetered between life and a hellish death by fire, the officers knew nothing of the reason behind his seemingly unshakeable death wish.
Paul “Dick” Emery, then an acting patrol sergeant, had heard details of the incident by radio and responded as back-up to Lockwood. Emery felt unnerved by Casey’s continual slow turning of the lighter’s ignition, but realized the urgent need for a rescue plan. The officers understood that Casey could set himself on fire well before they could overpower him.
“We had to make a decision quickly,” Emery remembers, “on how we’d deal with it if he did actually torch himself.”
Also on the scene was solo traffic officer, Constable Peter Broadbent. He, too, had heard the incident details by radio, which instantly jogged his memory of a blanket in the boot of his patrol car. He had charged toward Gilles St knowing that few other patrols would have any equipment with which to smother flames.
As he drove, Broadbent’s mind had filled with images of Buddhist monks who burn themselves to death as a religious sacrifice.
He arrived in Gilles St within only minutes, parked 100 metres from the stand-off and collected the blanket from his patrol car boot. In the distance, he could see Casey standing on the footpath and Lockwood talking to him. But now, Broadbent quickly conceived a plan to move stealthily along the footpath until he could blindside Casey and wrap him in the blanket.
So, he began his move, as desperate police attempts to draw conversation from and reason with Casey continued. Those attempts, however, proved fruitless. And, with Casey’s identity unknown to the police, they could not summon a member of his family or friend for help. Nor, with what they perceived as limited time to save a life, could they call on specialist police to negotiate a resolution.
Either through his copper’s instinct, or just good character judgement, Emery, then 37, could sense “something was going to happen”. Unaware of Broadbent’s approach, he decided to check his own patrol car for anything he could use to stifle Casey’s threatened fire.
“I’d only walked a couple of paces back towards the car,” says Emery, “and I heard the lighter click more rapidly.”
Emery now had no doubt that Casey had finally chosen the moment of his own demise. He turned and started to walk back toward him when, suddenly, Casey flicked his lighter for the last time and burst into flames!
Says Emery of Casey’s first seconds engulfed in those flames: “I can remember the speed at which he ignited - it just went so fast. He was just like a Roman candle (fire cracker). His hair almost stood straight up, and there was this huge flame coming straight up from the top of his head. It was a very eerie feeling.”
Both Emery and Lockwood instinctively leapt toward Casey and began a frantic attempt to beat the flames out with their bare hands. “There was nothing else in the near vicinity that we could use,” says Emery, “there was only our hands.
“You’ve got the thought that you must do something, or this poor fellow’s going to die. We were trying to rip the shirt from him to get the flames away from his body. And, (we were) hitting him on top of his head, trying to put the flames out and get him to the ground.”
At the moment the fire started, Broadbent - who had crept up to only about 30 metres from Casey - made a desperate sprint toward the deathly commotion.
“In one move,” says Broadbent, “I jumped, threw the blanket over him, got him on the ground and smothered the fire. You could see that most of his skin had already started to shrivel and peel away, and his hair had either gone or singed back close to the skin.”
Broadbent had felt the flames’ intense heat through the thick woollen blanket, and from what he had seen, the fire spared no part of Casey’s body. Even his feet, which were bare, suffered burns. Death may never have been a certainty, but horrific, lasting injuries were now guaranteed.
“It must have hurt like mad,” Broadbent ponders, “and this guy was just standing there burning. Scary stuff.”
The officers soon believed they had quelled the fire and so removed the blanket. But to their horror, Casey’s jean’s crotch suddenly re-ignited! Broadbent immediately re-wrapped him in the blanket, smothering the relentless flames.
Finally, the officers had the fire beaten and miraculously emerged injury-free. The air was filled with the stench of burnt hair, as Casey sat upright on the footpath supported by his outstretched arms behind his back.
“I don’t think any of us really knew what to say,” says Broadbent. “He was still very quiet and just shivered like he was cold, which I guess was shock.
“He had that 1,000-yard stare, which looked like he was just looking off into the horizon. He really just wanted to die, (but) we eventually got him to tell us who he was.”
An ambulance crew arrived and began treating Casey’s life-threatening injuries, but further efforts were still to come from the police officers. The ambulance crew members wanted someone to drive them in their vehicle to the Royal Adelaide Hospital while they continued to treat Casey.
So Broadbent obliged, driving the ambulance straight across the eastern end of the city. Lockwood, in his patrol car, tried to clear a path through the increasingly heavy afternoon traffic. Soon, however, they safely delivered Casey to the RAH, where he was left for emergency treatment.
Why Casey wanted to die, Broadbent discovered, was because of a break-up with a woman employee of St Andrew’s Hospital.
one of the officers had considered his own safety in the scramble to save Casey’s life. But Emery and Broadbent’s assessment of their own actions was like that of most dedicated cops: highly understated, with credit apportioned to others.
“I don’t think I really did much,” says Emery. “It was the (good) fortune of Broadbent there with the blanket.”
And, although Broadbent felt he and his colleagues did everything they could, he still had to reassure himself that his actions had been mistake-free.
Nonetheless, it seemed their courageous conduct had been enough to guarantee Casey’s survival. But for that conduct, the officers received not even the lowest-level SAPOL commendation.
As time past, Broadbent, then 28, became plagued by his vivid recollections of the incident. “I had nightmares about it in bold, living colour - replaying everything over and over,” he says, “(or) I’d be driving around in the traffic car and find myself in Gilles St.
“Most of the time I was thinking: ‘What could we have done different?’ and, ‘What could we have done better?’ That little bit of self-doubt started to creep in.
“It doesn’t matter how big, tough or strong you are, this sort of thing affects different people in different ways.”
Broadbent even visited Casey in the hospital’s ICU a week after the tragedy. “I guess (it was out of) concern for his welfare; to see that he was doing all right,” he explains. “I could see he was semi-conscious and had pretty horrible burns all over his body.”
A month later, Broadbent visited SAPOL’s welfare facility, where he “talked the whole thing through” with a senior counsellor. After two sessions he felt much better and seemed no longer troubled - until he attended a psychology lecture for work six months later.
The lecturer related the story of a disturbed man who, several times, had attempted suicide. “...and the final time,” the lecturer revealed, “he set fire to himself outside St Andrew’s Hospital - and died a month later.”
Broadbent knew instantly that the dead man was Casey. “I couldn’t believe he died and no one told us,” he says. “It was a big ‘downer’. It was like hearing that someone you knew had died.”
oth Emery and Broadbent have long moved on, but each lives with stark images of that January afternoon. For Emery, the sight of Casey’s burning head with his hair erect amid the flames “sticks in my mind”.
“Every now and then,” he says, “you look back and think: ‘How could someone do that to himself?’ (But) if you think about it too deeply, you might have thoughts about it when you go home.
“If you go and have a beer and a laugh about it, that tends to get you over the line. You come back to work the next day and get on with it.
“The loss of life is never a joke, but if you can find something to laugh about, it relieves that tension.”
Broadbent lives with the disappointment that Casey died despite “our best efforts”. “It’s something you never forget,” he insists, “and that place is always going to be where the guy set fire to himself, not the back of St Andrew’s Hospital.”
|
|
||||||||||
|
The Police Journal Online is an
official publication of the Police Association of South Australia and is
published monthly. Editors of kindred publications can seek permission from the Editor to re-publish any Police Journal Online article. Copyright 1999 The Police Association of South Australia sustance |
