Murder in the park: The cold case that reached Canberra

By Charlotte Grieve

Anthony Cawsey’s murder remains unsolved.

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Bryland Stewart and his brother woke before sunrise for a weekend jog in Sydney’s Centennial Park.

As the brothers entered the sprawling inner-city parklands on September 26, 2009, they noticed a man on the banks of Busby’s Pond – outstretched and face down.

“His eyes were open,” Stewart says. “The blood had obviously stopped moving and pooled up towards his head.”

The dead man was Anthony Cawsey, a 37-year-old from Redfern’s housing commission towers who worked odd shifts at a stage set-up company.

The official cause of death was hemopericardium – a bleeding heart caused by a single stab wound to his chest.

His pants were pulled down, exposing his bare buttocks wearing both a black G-string and pink women’s underwear. There were two cigarette butts and a red lighter with the inscription “TONY” close to the body. These items held DNA evidence that would come to haunt the detectives tasked with finding the killer.

Stewart wasn’t carrying a mobile, so he rushed to find someone in the park to call the police.

Police closed the running track with crime scene tape as they photographed the body and a team of divers searched the water for the murder weapon.

Moses Kellie was the sole suspect for the murder of Anthony Cawsey.Credit: NSW Police

But the knife was never discovered – nor was the identity of the person who had used it.

Moses Kellie, a refugee from Sierra Leone living in the park at the time, was charged with the murder in 2015, more than five years after the crime. But the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped the case, citing problems with the evidence and Kellie’s mental health.

It knocked back a second police attempt to bring charges for the same reasons. The police never had any other suspects.

An investigation by this masthead has retraced that police investigation and what followed. It reveals the extraordinary steps taken by detectives to hold Kellie accountable for the murder, which ended in his death by hanging in an immigration detention cell.

This is a story of two deaths without answers, and exposes the little-known flow of information between police and politicians that experts warn undermines the principle of being considered innocent until proven guilty.

It comes after this month’s landmark High Court ruling that indefinite immigration detention is unlawful in some circumstances, reigniting a fierce political debate about the rights of detainees and the safety of the Australian community.

Through interviews with witnesses, immigration guards, detainees and detectives and obtaining hundreds of public and leaked documents, the investigation reveals detectives went beyond their usual remit of gathering evidence to secure a conviction.

Instead they launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade then-immigration minister Peter Dutton to have Kellie deported.

Kellie spent three years in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre awaiting the outcome of his visa. Interviews with dozens of immigration system insiders reveal cascading failures in his medical care before he died in January 2019.

The death triggered a riot among detainees – and remains the subject of a NSW coronial inquiry plagued by delays and cloaked in secrecy.

For those left behind, many unanswered questions remain. “Why did my brother die? Justice must prevail,” Kellie’s sister Elizabeth Josiah says in her first interview. “I will never give up.”

Fatal moment

It was a warm spring day when Cawsey woke before sunrise to start work. It would be his last day alive, spent doing drugs, having phone sex with men on gay chat lines and cycling to the beach for a swim with his housemate.

Records released by the NSW Special Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes piece together his final moments including CCTV that captured him leaving the Redfern flats in the early hours of the morning of September 26, 2009 headed for Centennial Park.

CCTV captures Cawsey leaving his apartment for the last time at 4.24am.Credit: NSW Police

At 4.44am, he recorded a message on a gay chat line: “Hi I’m a tall slim guy feeling really horny and kinky. I’m just in a park on the edge of the city in Sydney.”

Shortly after, Cawsey connected with a man in what would be his last call. They mutually masturbated over the phone before hanging up.

Thirty-two minutes later, Cawsey was found dead on the banks of Busby’s Pond.

Centennial Park was a known gay beat. Standing near the crime scene in the days after the murder, then-NSW Police assistant commissioner Paul Pisanos told media it was an “extremely sensitive matter” and all information would be treated with the “strictest confidence”.

Detectives looked at whether the murder was a gay hate crime. They interviewed dozens of people who used the gay chat line, taking DNA swabs from more than 70, but found no leads.

Detectives sought advice from an expert, who determined the lack of “excessive violence” or “mutilation” of the body indicated the murder was not a hate crime.

In 2016, they turned to detective Geoff Steer for help, who had set up the bias crimes unit in the aftermath of the Cronulla riots.

That unit was disbanded in May 2009 – five months before the murder – and wasn’t reinstated until 2012. Steer said general incident data did not indicate any bias crimes (those motivated by race, religion, sexuality) in the area at the time, but warned these types of crimes were often under-reported.

Today, Steer says homicide detectives still have no idea how to identify bias crimes, let alone investigate them, as the training and resources are simply not available.

The NSW government set up the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes last year to investigate all unsolved suspected hate crime deaths between 1970 and 2010, and Cawsey’s murder was among the last to be reviewed.

The inquiry subpoenaed a tranche of documents from the police investigation – interview transcripts, evidence briefs, correspondence. In July, counsel assisting Kathleen Heath made submissions that, despite the opinion given to police, the facts did give rise to the “possibility that his sexuality was a factor in the attack”.

Heath said it was “difficult to ignore the confluence of features” – the public masturbation, the crime scene being near a known gay beat and the position of Cawsey’s clothing – that indicate the murder was a hate crime.

Former detective-turned-journalist Duncan McNab has closely followed the way these types of crimes are investigated and said conclusions like the opinion police relied on were often based on preconceptions.

“I always get troubled when they say gay hate crimes have to have a degree of ferocity. They always think it’s some crazed murder,” he says. “It can be as simple as coming across someone you don’t like. If you throw someone off a cliff, it’s not excessive force, it’s just one dreadful, fatal moment.”

Friends shocked

For Cawsey’s friendship circle, this remains shocking. Ten of Cawseys’ friends this masthead spoke to said they had no idea his sexuality was anything other than straight.

Cawsey grew up in Melbourne’s Ringwood, the youngest of a strictly Christian family. He moved to Sydney as a teenager and finished school at Cumberland High.

Those close to him describe Cawsey as “the smile behind my smiles”, a man who quickly became the life of the party, who had a sharp intellect and astute street sense.

“He was a real kind of crazy guy. Happy-go-lucky. You know, like a lot of energy, a manic energy,” says high school friend Brenden Parker.

The tight-knit friendship circle was formed in the 1990s during the colourful parties of Sydney’s underground rave scene.

Vibe Tribe was a party collective that mixed psychedelic music with protest politics. Cawsey was a mainstay at all parties, held in parks or empty warehouses around the city.

Cawsey made a strong group of friends through Sydney’s rave scene in the 1990s.

Drugs were the lifeblood of these events – and Cawsey was not just taking drugs, but selling them. Friend Luke Lorenz says organised crime surrounded the fringes of the scene.

“It got scary,” Lorenz says. “I never knew where anything came from, but of course it came from bikies, or drug lords, or dangerous people … And Tony was one of those people who actually touched the edge of the scene and dealt with these people.”

As the 1990s ended, the friendship group splintered. Some focused on building families and careers – others, including Cawsey, continued to party.

Addiction became a feature of Cawsey’s life, and he spent days with friends in his Elizabeth Bay apartment using and selling amphetamines.

“It was great fun. Until the drugs kind of took over in the early 2000s. And then it got ugly,” said one friend who dealt drugs with Cawsey and declined to be named due to fear of self-incrimination.

“That was the death of the party scene, to be quite honest. So it was definitely not a party any more. It was just a bunch of drug addicts hanging out together.”

When news of the murder spread among the friendship group, they rushed to give statements and DNA to the police.

Lorenz was an avid watcher of American crime show 48 Hours, so he went to Maroubra Police Station the day he learnt of his friend’s death. He told the officers about Cawsey’s drug dealing, and fallouts he’d had with friends.

“The [gay] phone line stuff was completely out of the blue for us,” Lorenz says. “So I was honest to the police, and I told him as much as I could, just because I thought that might be clues, avenues to look at.”

He remembers being shocked by mistakes made by the officer taking his statement, who wrote facts incorrectly and fumbled with the computer, allowing the murder scene photos to flash on the screen.

“My hopes of this being resolved or to try to see justice or anything dissipated very quickly,” Lorenz says.

Former homicide detective Anthony Macklin worked at Maroubra Police Station from 2004 to 2008 – leaving a year before Cawsey’s murder – and says the station was plagued by systemic problems at that time, from under-staffing to high turnover that meant often junior staff were put on complex cases.

“What people may not realise is, it was one of the busiest stations in the state,” Macklin says. “It wasn’t uncommon for detectives to have 30 cases.”

“At times, I remember, we didn’t even have enough computers for the detectives that were on. So I think there were three cars for the detectives to use. And most of the time you were kind of sharing a computer with someone else,” he said. “It was very stretched.”

Cawsey’s high school friend Parker also had concerns about the early stages of the police investigation. He visited Cawsey’s housemate in the days after the murder, who said detectives had been to his home, but only briefly.

“The cops went in, said, ‘Right, where’s his bedroom?’ OK. Got the ice. Left,” Parker says. “Why didn’t they come around and upend the place? You know, get the forensic team in there with the rubber gloves and have a good, good scrub of his room. They didn’t do that … Was it because he was just another junkie poof?”

The detectives seized 26 items from the apartment that day, records show, and interviewed more than two dozen of Cawsey’s associates during their investigation. None returned any leads.

Overall, police took DNA samples from more than 120 people, including users of the gay chat lines, friends, colleagues and associates. Police also had a number of tip-offs – including one man who marched into the Dee Why Police Station and confessed to the murder, twice. These were both dismissed as lacking credibility.

Macklin said detectives were facing a tough investigation from the start, with no CCTV in the park and few witnesses. “That makes it that much harder for the investigators to try to find the person find the right person and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was.”

NSW Police declined a request for an interview, but a spokeswoman said it was inappropriate to comment on the investigation before the NSW hate crime inquiry handed down its final report. She said the police support the inquiry and look forward to considering its recommendations.

Lorenz called the station regularly for updates. He was told they were looking into it, but there was nothing to share. He had almost given up when he received a call out of the blue from a distant friend, Jojo Dorman.

Dorman, who died last year so could not confirm the conversation, told Lorenz she knew a detective on the case who was leaking information.

“They’ve got their eyes on someone,” Lorenz says he was told. “He’d accidentally confessed to this, thinking it was something else.”

That “someone” was Moses Kellie.

Sole suspect

A week after Cawsey’s murder, homicide detectives were back at the crime scene at 4.30am looking for witnesses.

Detective Peter Bishop walked the dirt track that runs along Busby’s Pond when he saw a man in a black hood who would become the sole suspect in the case – Kellie.

The dirt track where detectives first encountered Moses Kellie. Credit: NSW Police

Then aged 24, Kellie had arrived in Australia three years earlier on a special humanitarian visa from Sierra Leone, escaping the civil war that had killed more than 70,000 people, including his mother, who was murdered by rebels.

Kellie became an orphan at nine and inquiry records show his childhood was filled with violence, drugs and alcohol. By 12, he was smoking several marijuana joints a day and drinking to the point of intoxication, according to medical records.

The family split during the war, and Kellie spent time in a refugee camp in Guinea, before his sister arranged for him to come to Australia and live with her family in Sydney’s Blacktown. Here, he became close to Daniel Josiah, who remains shocked by what police would allege about his conduct.

“Having Moses, it felt like I had a big brother. We shared a lot of stuff,” he says. “He never showed any signs of violence, or anger.”

In Sydney, Kellie studied aged care and volunteered at Parramatta’s Wesley Mission. But when Centrelink declined to pay for a course he needed for a paid aged care job, he started work in a factory before becoming unemployed.

He was living in a share house in Marrickville and struggled to find a new job due to poor English when Centrelink cut off his payments. With no income, he became homeless.

“He reapplied to Centrelink several times, but each time he was refused. He knew of no one who could help him,” wrote a psychologist who later interviewed Kellie in prison.

Kellie posing for a photograph on the day detectives first took his statement.Credit: NSW Police

“He felt demoralised, desperate and saw no future. He lost confidence in himself. He had no one to talk to and his sole companion was a small radio.

“He was happy when he arrived in Australia and looked forward to making a positive start in life, but he was now depressed and anxious about where his life was heading.”

Living in the park, Kellie used methamphetamines around once a week. He heard voices, barely slept and became reclusive. He was seen muttering to himself and wearing heavy clothes in warm weather – symptoms of psychosis, according to forensic psychologists.

“He resorted to petty crime to provide him with basic necessities and some money. His activities also included stealing wine from a local supermarket. The alcohol numbed his distress, albeit temporarily,” according to one psychologist’s report.

In the park that morning with the detective, Kellie showed Bishop where he slept – one campsite under a pavilion when it rained, and another in the south-west corner of the park.

Afterwards, he went to the station to give a statement about his movements on the night of the murder. He told police he woke at 3am, walked to a newsagent to collect old newspapers and returned for water when he saw the police taping off the track. He read in the news the murder was a hate crime.

“There was a picture of a male who had his hat turned backwards and who was smiling. I have never seen this male before,” Kellie said in his statement.

The detectives found DNA samples of three anonymous men on Cawsey’s body and items nearby. Kellie consented to a mouth swab, which didn’t return a match. A forensic link between Kellie and the murder would never be established.

‘Did you kill Tony?’

Less than a week after Kellie gave his statement to the police, he committed a crime that would send him to prison.

During the early hours of the morning on October 11, a man was walking along the perimeter of the park speaking on his mobile to a friend.

Kellie approached him, shouting incoherently and waving a silver object believed to be a knife, according to statements. The man dropped his phone, ran off, and later discovered a slash on his arm which required two stitches.

The victim’s friend called the phone and heard a man with a thick accent on the other end of the line. It was Kellie – he’d stolen the phone.

Kellie pleaded guilty to robbery with wounding. The homicide detectives would allege this demonstrated a pattern of offending that made him more likely to be the person who killed Cawsey.

The following week, homicide detectives made a breakthrough in the case when they discovered another campsite in a drainpipe less than 100 metres from where Cawsey’s body was found.

There, detectives found a stash of knives, newspapers, sleeping bags, socks filled with coins, and the stolen phone. The site was described by police as unhygienic, and infested with spiders.

The discovery of Kellie’s drainpipe campsite would be a turning point in the murder investigation.Credit: NSW Police

When Kellie arrived, police said they suspected he was involved in the murder but did not have enough evidence to arrest him. They did, however, have powers to seize items that may be connected with a crime and wanted his clothes.

“The ones I’m wearing?” Kellie responded. “You’re going to take all my clothes?”

The police said they would give him a pair of overalls, but they needed to test his clothes for forensic evidence. He said he’d already given DNA, but agreed. “I don’t have any problem with that,” Kellie responded.

Kellie went to Maroubra Police Station for a second time to answer questions. The interview transcript shows he signed a “Details of a Person at a Police Station Voluntarily” form and declined to speak to a lawyer. Police assured him he was free to leave, and anything he said could be used against him.

In this interview, Kellie confirmed the campsite was his, and claimed possession of the items including the stolen phone and knives. But he insisted he didn’t sleep there on the night of the murder and said he used the knives for food.

Towards the end of the interview, detectives asked a series of direct questions.

“Did you kill Tony Cawsey?”

“No,” replied Kellie.

“Did you use any of those knives to kill Tony Cawsey?”

“I’ve never seen him before,” Kellie said.

Kellie was not detained and returned to the park. All the seized items, including Kellie’s shoes from the night of the murder, were then tested for Cawsey’s DNA – but, again, no matches were found. An expert examined the knives and found they could not be conclusively matched to Cawsey’s wound.

Regardless, the discovery would form the backbone of the case against Kellie. The police alleged Kellie’s failure to disclose the campsite was a “lie that amounted to a consciousness of guilt”.

Detectives now asked the park rangers to keep an eye out for Kellie and call triple zero when he was spotted. A ranger saw Kellie on October 24 and asked him to stay in the car until the police came.

“They both fell asleep … waiting for the cops to arrive,” another ranger, Colin Cheshire, says. “We always used to tease him and say, ‘You know he was alleged to be a murderer.’ ”

Cheshire was surprised that Kellie had changed from witness to suspect, he says. A ranger of more than 20 years, he said the park’s homeless population often kept to themselves and held knives for self-protection. Cheshire gave a statement to the police, confirming he had seen Kellie sleeping in the south-west corner of the park, where Kellie first took the police.

“The police didn’t actually confide in us rangers very much,” Cheshire says. “It seems to me they only came to us when they were really desperate.”

The police never came to take Kellie away, and that encounter with the rangers was the last time he was seen in the park. He took a bicycle and headed south, where he was found in the coastal town of Eden, arrested and questioned about the phone robbery.

This 43-minute interview would be the final plank of the police case against Kellie. It was here that Kellie described interactions that police would allege confused the robbery with the murder and counted these as “admissions”, a quasi-confession.

However, the detectives only put this theory to Kellie five years later when they charged him with murder – and were met with a denial.

“You don’t mix two things together,” Kellie said in response. “Armed robbery and murder, that’s two different things.”

‘Unfairness to accused’

The NSW special inquiry painstakingly retraced the steps taken by police investigating Cawsey’s murder and in June this year, delivered submissions.

The hearing took place in a heritage-listed sandstone building on Bridge Street in Sydney, in a small room with high ceilings where Cawsey’s sisters sat and took notes.

Counsel assisting Kathleen Heath started by reading the statement provided by the family, who believed police did everything they could and lay blame with the prosecutors for refusing to take Kellie to court.

“It should also be noted that Tony was loved. He displayed, like many gifted people, eccentric behaviour. And he always walked to the beat of his own drum,” Heath read.

Heath described the police investigation as “thorough” and “extensive”, but was critical of the five years it took to lay charges, which she said “can result in unfairness to an accused person.”

“Much of the evidence against him had already been collected by early 2010,” Heath said. “Delay can result in witnesses becoming unavailable, memories fading, or documents, records or other exhibits being lost.”

Heath ran through the entire police investigation – the DNA samples of unidentified men from the crime scene, the police evidence of “lies as consciousness of guilt”, “tendency and coincidence” evidence and “admissions” made in the Eden interview – and found while ultimately the case was compelling, it fell short.

She argued Kellie may have chosen not to disclose the campsite near the murder to protect what little privacy he had, to distance himself from the murder, or simply because it was a reflection of his disorganised mind. She also found his other offending was not unique enough, or similar to the murder, to amount to a pattern of behaviour that could be used in a murder trial.

“It is submitted the findings should reflect that the person who inflicted the stab wounds is unknown or cannot be conclusively determined,” Heath said.

The DPP agreed with this conclusion, and twice refused to prosecute the case.

Kellie detained

Kellie spent five years in prison for the phone theft and charges of another knife possession and assault committed near Fox Studios.

In sentencing remarks, Judge Michael Finnane in the District Court of NSW noted Kellie’s severe mental illness at the time of offending and “traumatic and tragic personal background”.

While in prison, Kellie completed a violent offender program and started a treatment plan for schizophrenia. He self-harmed, got into fights with other inmates, and told his sister he had been raped. During one visit from the family, he spoke of his plans for when he was released.

“He was ready to come out, start fresh,” cousin Daniel said. “He had his life planned. He had goals, just like we all do. And he was looking forward to starting his life afresh, and making something out of it, and making himself proud.”

That never happened.

New laws were introduced in 2014 making visa cancellations mandatory for non-citizens sentenced to more than 12 months in prison. There has since been a tenfold increase in the number of visa cancellations, where the character test must be passed to remain in Australia – a matrix that weighs up family connections, rehabilitation prospects and other factors against the safety of the Australian community.

Kellie was one of the first people to be impacted by the law change, and his visa was mandatorily cancelled in December 2014. He then began the process of challenging the cancellation to stay in Australia.

But his prospects of success became more complicated when homicide detectives became involved.

Correspondence obtained by this masthead under freedom of information shows a detective emailed the Department of Immigration in January 2015 asking what information can be considered by the minister when making deportation decisions before charges are laid.

“Specifically, I am raising the fact that Moses Kellie is a person of interest for the murder of [Cawsey],” one detective wrote on January 27, 2015. “Can Kellie’s status as a person of interest in this homicide investigation be held against him? If this is a factor that can be taken into account, will I be contacted to provide relevant material?”

Two days later, a department official responded.

“In the usual course of events, pending charges would not be included in the submission to the decision maker as they have not been proven and there is a presumption of innocence,” the letter said.

“If Mr Kellie’s status as a person of interest in a homicide was to be taken into consideration in any request for revocation of the visa cancellation, this would need to be disclosed to him and he be given an opportunity to respond to the allegations.”

The murder charge was laid in October 2015. When Kellie finished his prison sentence in September 2016, he was transferred to Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, to await the decision on his future in Australia.

That same month, on 13 September 2016, the DPP dropped the murder charge, informing the NSW Police there was “no reasonable prospect of conviction” due to problems with the police evidence and Kellie’s history of mental illness.

Despite this, and against the earlier advice of the department, the detectives then made a direct approach to then-Immigration minister Peter Dutton.

“Kellie is the prime suspect in the murder of [Anthony Cawsey],” the detective wrote to Dutton three weeks after the DPP dropped the murder charge. “There is no doubt from our perspective that Kellie murdered [Cawsey] by stabbing him in the chest with a knife.”

The five-page letter detailed the police case against Kellie for the murder, and included a suite of other alleged and unproven offences police said he had committed in the park and prison.

The detectives cast doubt on Kellie’s experience in Sierra Leone, and his ability to adhere to his mental health medication regime.

Most painful for his family, the police told Dutton that Kellie “no longer has family support in Australia. His sister was interviewed … she advised that Kellie would not be welcome in her home”.

The family says this could not be further from the truth. They had signed waivers taking responsibility for his care, they say, and were desperate to help him get back on track.

“The most devastating part was that we were treated like we didn’t exist,” Daniel says. “By the police, by the government, by everyone.”

Dutton and current Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil declined requests for interviews and did not answer questions about the case or the process with police. NSW Police did not respond to questions about how often this information sharing occurs, or what policies are in place to ensure procedural fairness to non-citizens.

‘I need some help’

Psychiatrists who reviewed Kellie after he self-harmed in prison found he was at “high risk of relapse if his medication discontinues” and had documented a history of psychosis, drug use and violence.

Despite this, a Serco risk assessment completed upon his arrival in Villawood stated he had no history of violence, drug use or self-harm. Serco is paid by the federal government to run onshore detention centres, providing security, non-health service welfare, catering and transport services. Six days after entering immigration detention, Kellie attempted suicide.

Ahmed Sherif was his roommate in Villawood’s Blaxland compound – a since-closed dormitory that he described as overcrowded, violent and infested with vermin.

Sherif found Kellie hanging and cut him loose before emergency staff performed life support for two minutes. “I saved his life,” Sherif says. “This is the incompetence of the people running the sites.”

Over the following years in detention, Kellie’s mental state deteriorated. Sherif says he would regularly wake in the middle of the night, screaming his mother’s name.

Retirees Graeme and Sue Swincer were part of a volunteer group which visited refugees and saw Kellie regularly.

“I detected a distinct change of mood where he used to be a little bit bubbly and friendly and even-tempered. He started, to be, to say nonsensical things,” Graeme says. “We couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. He was very disturbed.”

What they didn’t know was that his mental health medication was changed and increased – and that International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), the healthcare provider in immigration detention, and Serco, routinely failed to administer the correct dose.

Deficient IT systems failed to alert staff when he skipped medications or missed appointments. These broken systems resulted in Kellie routinely missing his antipsychotic medication, according to confidential sources, once for a period of more than 80 consecutive days.

Eventually, Kellie passed a handwritten note to another detainee: “I am Moses I need some help and need to talk to someone about my problems so I can get some mental help or something please. MOSES KELLIE.”

This would trigger an intervention, where Kellie was sectioned in Liverpool Hospital for two weeks. When he started to show signs of improvement, he was sent back to Villawood and the facility was given a strict medication regime.

However, once again, IHMS failed to follow the hospital’s instructions or monitor him, according to several detention officials and detainee sources, speaking anonymously because of confidentiality agreements.

Kellie became more reclusive, skipped meals and spent days in bed. He was observed more than once staring blankly into his cell’s bathroom, where three weeks later, on January 25, 2019, he was found hanging for the last time.

Another detainee, Butrous Chol, found him and cut the ligature this time. Guards were called and a code blue (for medical emergencies) was declared. Paramedics arrived and performed life support. Kellie was intubated and suffered cardiac arrest. At 6.32pm, he was pronounced dead in the cell.

The detainees were furious. Sherif, Chol, and others had warned guards that Kellie was unwell, and they could not understand why he had been left alone. “He had already attempted suicide, they should have had him on watch. They didn’t do that,” Sherif says.

A riot ensued. One guard, familiar with the event but who cannot be named due to strict Serco confidentiality agreements, says it was chaotic. “Screaming, yelling, shouting, throwing things, people trying to punch the officers, kick them. It was getting physical,” the guard said, noting there were no serious injuries.

Chol said the day Kellie had returned from Liverpool Hospital, government officials began “threatening him to be removed forcibly back to [his] country of origin”.

Kellie’s fellow detainees sought to calm him by reminding him of Australia’s non-refoulement obligations, Chol says, that prevent the government from sending detainees to countries where they are at risk of harm.

“He kind of relaxed a bit after we spoke to him, and then later on that day he committed suicide,” Chol said via WhatsApp message. “I strongly believe [his] death was preventable. The medical observation on him shouldn’t be lifted.”

The findings of the coroner’s inquest, which will examine these claims, are yet to be delivered.

Serco declined an interview, but a spokesman said it would be inappropriate to comment while Kellie’s death was being examined by the coroner.

“The safety and wellbeing of all detainees in Serco’s care is of paramount importance to Serco,” the spokesman said. “Serco extends its sincere condolences to the family and friends of Mr Moses Kellie for their loss.”

Border Force also declined an interview. A spokesperson said they can’t comment on individual cases but defended the quality of healthcare services and facilities of immigration detention centres.

No closure

For those left behind by both deaths, there has been no closure.

Kellie’s family say his death at 34 years old, and then dealing with the immigration system and coronial inquest, was more traumatising then their wartime experience in Sierra Leone. “We came here for protection. Moses was here to be safe from what happened to my country. And now, look what happened to him,” his sister Josiah says.

She says it took almost a year for the government to release Kellie’s remains and the family had to crowdfund the money needed to expatriate the body to bury him in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Kellie’s funeral in Sierra Leone, December 2019.

The family’s pain has been compounded by ongoing delays in the coroner’s inquest – which they hope will provide some justice and prevent other families from having to endure what they have.

“Moses wasn’t treated like a human being,” Daniel Kellie says. “It’s a very sad way to go. His story is very sad … They treated us like we didn’t exist, and we’re right around the corner.”

Daniel says Kellie trusted the authorities, but was let down.

“From the get-go, that’s just how it’s always felt like people get treated, because they don’t know their rights, or they don’t know how the justice system works. So they get bullied into it, they get pushed to do things that they don’t know what they’re doing, or sign[ing] up to.”

The Cawseys, on the other hand, want an overhaul in the way cold cases are handled – regular DNA testing and a national database. But for now, they’re confident in the actions taken by police. “The police did everything they could,” says Kerri Cawsey.

If you or anyone you know needs support call Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.

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