Tyler Cassidy was 15 and 'very upset' when he was shot dead by police near a skate park in Fairfield, Melbourne, early one evening in 2008.
Evidence about that night is being led, day by anguishing day, to a Melbourne inquest, in an investigation sought by his mother because she can't believe that her bereaved little boy died by gunshot. Champions of independent investigations into police killings have welcomed the inquest.
Nothing in what I write is meant to influence the coroner's findings. That ancient office is meant to quiet public concerns about the circumstances of a sudden or violent death or disaster. But a coronial inquest is not a court proceeding. A coroner establishes the facts. She can't give grieving families what they crave when a member dies violently, or suspiciously, unnecessarily, too young, or too cruelly: a finding of guilt.
There's no such thing as closure for such a wound, though over time it folds like the wake behind a ship. Those who sailed away have gone. Those who are left, remain. Grief has to be brought within bounds.
Knowing what happened, helps. It also helps to ask just how we expect our guardians of public order to balance the community need to feel safe with the protection of the vulnerable; especially when the person who is 'the problem' is both a victim and a perpetrator.
So far, the inquest has been told that an adolescent who hadn't been able to fit in at school or with his peer group, wasn't perceived as a child in trouble by the armed police sent to deal with him. They weren't to know how wounded he had been by his father's death when he was 11. There was not enough time to ask what had tipped him into this public state of disconnection from friends, family and neighbourhood.
Like many adolescents, Cassidy might have been trying on roles that day; learning how to manage his 'moods' — 'worst ever', he texted to a friend that morning — and his need for his pain to be acknowledged. Like most adolescents, his state of mind fluctuated. A couple of women who saw him shot talked with him shortly before the confrontation, recalling that he patted their dog and chatted cheerfully.
Teenage years are hell for many of us, as hormones rage, autonomy beckons but our undeveloped frontal lobes fail to allow us to predict the