28 Feb 2018

NSW prison guards took 11 hours to help dying prisoner

From Morning Report, 8:39 am on 28 February 2018

An inquest into the death of New Zealander Junior Togatuki in a New South Wales prison has been told of the 11-hour delay it took officers to respond to his calls for help. In an open address to the inquest, the counsel assisting the coroner, Simeon Beckett, said Mr Togatuki, who's also known as Junior Fenika, used his intercom twice in the hours before his death to alert officers that he'd harmed himself. But he was only checked on the next day by officers, at which point he had bled to death. He had written messages of love to his family in his own blood. The 23-year-old who had lived in Australia since he was four was being kept in isolation while awaiting deportation to New Zealand. Last night I spoke to ABC journalist Brooke Wylie who's been covering the inquest - I began by asking her why it took so long for the officers to go to the cell.