The Russell Street Bombing

by Vikki Petraitis

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  THE RUSSELL STREET BOMBING

  by

  Vikki Petraitis

  BLURB

  In 1986 a bomb went off outside the main police headquarters in Russell Street Melbourne.

  THE RUSSELL STREET BOMBING looks at the consequences of this shocking act of violence from the point of view of an entire city, the police force that was targeted, and in particular one 19-year-old victim.

  THE RUSSELL STREET BOMBING

  On Thursday 27 March 1986, Constable Carl Donadio was 19-years-old and had been in the police force for five months. After graduating from the Victoria Police Academy, new recruits rotated through different areas of the police force to gain wider experience. For the young lad from Ballarat, every aspect of policing was fascinating. He'd joined up on a bit of a whim because a good mate had applied. Ironically, the mate didn't get accepted and Donadio did.

  And because he'd joined the Force without much thought or research, Carl Donadio found the rotating exposures to different aspects of policing enlightening. His first stint was the St Albans police station, in the heartland of the Melbourne's western suburbs. In the first couple of weeks, he and another police officer had been called to a domestic dispute at a St Albans house. The door was opened by a boy of about four or five years of age and to Donadio's horror, the small child said, 'What the fuck do you want?'

  The young cop started to tell the child that he shouldn't use language like that, but realised he was wasting his breath when the kid ran up the front passage way, yelling to his feuding parents, 'Mum! Dad! The pigs are here!' This was Donadio's first glimpse of the hatred of police that could be passed on, via the umbilical cord, from one generation to the next.

  It was during his time at St Albans, that Carl Donadio decided where his future direction lay as a cop. He was waiting at red traffic lights riding shotgun with a more senior police officer.

  'Don't look left,' his partner said to him.

  'Why not?' Donadio asked, resisting the natural urge to look to the left at the car that had pulled up next to them at the lights.

  'They're dogs,' said the partner, using the police colloquialism for undercover surveillance operatives. Sure enough, Donadio could see out of his peripheral vision, an undercover hold up a police badge surreptitiously at the window before they roared off after another vehicle.

  Donadio was full of questions: how did his partner know they were dogs? What did dogs do? And when his partner, who had worked in surveillance, told him about life as an undercover operative, Donadio knew, then and there, that he would pursue it as a career path. He reckoned that surveillance work would fit with his policing philosophy - he was there to catch crooks. At 19, things were simple. There were good guys and bad guys. And the cops caught the bad guys.

  After a couple of months at St Albans, Donadio rotated through city traffic, the Traffic Operations Group, and then the Records department. From there, he landed a stretch doing court security. He would arrive at the Russell Street police headquarters and his duty sergeant would allocate him a court to guard. It was his job to sit at the back of the courtroom and provide protection for the magistrate should any angry family members disagree with a sentence, or if a crook got violent.

  On 27 March which was Easter Thursday, Donadio was allocated a courtroom across the road from the Russell Street police headquarters at the Melbourne Magistrate's Court. It would be his last shift before Easter, and he was looking forward to a couple of days off to spend the long weekend at home in Ballarat. Aunts, uncles and cousins would all descend on the Donadio family home for one of his mum's roast dinners. He was the only cop in the extended family and he could regale them with some of his policing stories.

  Working court security wasn't quite as interesting as St Albans. It was only Donadio's third shift at the court - the first two had involved boring fraud cases which had made the young cop look at his watch every couple of minutes - mostly in disbelief at how slowly the time was going. But this case was a criminal case and more interesting than the others.

  Around 12.30pm, one witness finished his testimony, and rather than start the next witness so soon before the lunch break, the magistrate adjourned early. Donadio stayed behind to ask the Clerk of Courts a question about court procedures. He was young and keen to learn as much as he could in his rotation period. He chatted to the clerk for a while and then made his way out the front door. He would head over to the Russell Street police headquarters to get some lunch.

  As Donadio was leaving the courthouse, another police officer, Constable Angela Taylor, 21-years-old, flipped a coin with a colleague as to who go and buy the lunches from the police canteen. Taylor had lost the coin toss and crossed at the lights on Latrobe and made her way up to the south door.

  As Donadio waited at the traffic lights on the corner of Latrobe and Russell streets, he realised that he didn't know how to get to the police canteen via the south door which was the closest door to Latrobe Street. He was new to the Russell Street police headquarters and only knew the route to the canteen through the north door a bit further up Russell Street. Rather than wait for the lights to change, Donadio walked back up Russell Street past the Magistrates' Court and began to cross the road, walking diagonally towards the north door entrance to the police building.

  A sudden impact sent him flying fifteen metres up the road. He landed on his backside and, momentarily stunned, thought that he must have been hit by a car. But then he saw plumes of smoke. He knew it wasn't a car that hit him.

  At the same moment, but on the opposite side of the road, Angela Taylor was caught in a fireball...

  Inspector Bruce Knight of the Victoria Police Special Operations Group was looking out his office window. A bus picked up a group of passengers outside the entrance to the Russell Street police headquarters and traffic lights at both ends of the block went red, momentarily emptying the street of traffic. It was 1pm and the day had been slow. He wondered to himself what he was going to do to fill in a couple of quiet hours and was just about to say as much to a colleague when he heard the explosion.

  Before his eyes, he saw what looked like a car bonnet come flying up past the window. At the same moment, an explosion shook the building raining debris in the usually quiet city street. The SOG was normally called out to such events; this time the action had come to them.

  Hundreds of other occupants of the Russell Street police headquarters were rocked by the explosion as well. Windows all over the building shattered and fine black dust blew out of the wooden roof and covered desks and equipment inside the building. Shocked police officers of all ranks looked out their broken windows and saw thick black smoke funnelling furiously from the source of the explosion - a car parked right outside their front door.

  The first indication to the wider policing community that a major incident had occurred at Russell Street came over the police radio:

  Russell Street 750: ...I presume you heard that loud explosion

  D-24: Russell Street 750, it's totally shattered our windows.

  Russell Street 750: Copy that 306...a loud explosion's took place outside the front of the complex. There's mess everywhere.

  D24: Copy that Russell Street 306. All units approach with caution just in case there's a second... Russell Street 150, we just had a large explosion occur outside the building - a car bomb, it seems. Shattered all the windows of this office. Received.

  Members
of the highly-trained SOG launched into their precision response. Dressed in their customary dark overalls, everyone on duty in the SOG offices raced down three flights to the street below. The scene looked more like a street in war-torn Beirut than down-town Melbourne.

  The epicentre of the blast was a car parked outside the south entrance to the building. From the outset, it looked like the results of a bomb rather than an accidental explosion. Injured people lay moaning on the ground and fires from the blast were sending palls of thick smoke over the city. Many people had been hit by pieces of shrapnel forced outwards by the explosion with the velocity of bullets. Nobody was prepared for something like this to happen, but, for the Victoria Police Special Operations Group, scenes like this were exactly what they had trained for.

  The first priority for the SOG was to clear and contain the area. Inspector Knight and his men removed the wounded as quickly as possible because a second bomb was a real possibility, indeed a series of small explosions continued to emanate from the bombed car. Civilians - ordinary people enjoying a lunch break - also helped drag the wounded away from the blast site. Fire engines screamed to the scene, and chaos reigned. Fierce flames radiated out from the explosion site which had ignited an unmarked police car parked directly behind it. It too burnt furiously.

  Having been caught in the full force of the bomb, Angela Taylor staggered across the street into the Magistrates' Court where she was helped by lawyer Bernie Balmer. Seeing her, he was confronted by a sight he would never forget. One of her shoes was on fire, her shirt was nearly torn from her body, and with each breath she took, blood pumped out of her. He smothered the flames and gently sat her down on the floor and asked for her name. She said it was Angela. The lawyer telephoned for medical assistance and did the best he could to comfort the badly injured policewoman.

  Meanwhile, Carl Donadio tried to stand up, but his right leg had gone numb. He felt for a wound and was shocked when his fingers disappeared inside a deep gash in his thigh. He realised that it was a car exploding outside the south door that had thrown him down the road, and since the first explosion was quickly followed by several other smaller ones. He knew he needed to find cover quickly. He dragged himself to the gutter near the wall of the Russell Street police building. Two female police officers, Selena and Vanessa, helped him to the relative safety of the wall. A couple of civilian women were there also. Donadio shouted at them to get as far away as they could.

  Vanessa removed her shirt and wrapped it around the gaping wound in Donadio's leg, while Selena fashioned a tourniquet to keep it in place. Sitting on the footpath, Selena rested her downed colleague's head on her lap and spoke gently to sooth him, but as soon as Donadio lay flat, he started gasping for breath. Until that moment, he had registered that he'd been injured, but when his breathing became laboured, he realised that he might be in more serious trouble. The more he tried to breathe, the more it hurt and he started to panic. Both Vanessa and Selena urged him to keep calm. Selena told him that there was some blood on the back of his shirt and he might have punctured a lung. When Donadio considered this, he knew that it felt similar to when he'd punctured a lung playing footy after a knock to the ribs. But this felt worse though. From experience, he knew it was vital to calm down because panicking only made breathing more difficult.

  When he stabilised his breathing, the policewomen tried to take his mind of things. Referring to his face, which had only sustained a small cut above his right eye, Selena said, 'You still got your good looks though.'

  Despite his injuries, he still managed to joke. 'Yeah,' he gasped, 'my Mona Lisa face.'

  Within what seemed like minutes, he was collected by an ambulance and on his way to the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

  When the bomb exploded, either by accident or by design, flames and heat had shot out one side, while the bulk of the shrapnel had shot out the other. It was for this reason that Angela Taylor was so severely burnt, while Carl Donadio was barely burnt but rather hit by flying shrapnel. Magistrate Iain West was also on the shrapnel-side of the explosion and suffered serious injuries along with nine other police officers and ten civilians.

  Once the area was cleared of the injured, members of the SOG went into action. Their immediate priority was to extinguish the ensuing flames. Fire had already spread to the unmarked police car behind the bomb car and, if not extinguished, would lead to a domino effect engulfing the line of cars parked up Russell Street. It seemed like the whole top end of Melbourne had turned black. Sirens screamed as police, fire trucks and ambulances converged on Russell Street. Media flocked to the scene and helicopters flew overhead to film the damage sometimes barely visible through the thick black smoke.

  Because small explosions continued to emanate from the centre of the blast, fire fighters were unwilling to get too close. The job of extinguishing the flames fell to the SOG. Dressed in a bomb suit, SOG member Senior Constable Dennis Tipping cautiously approached the burning cars.

  Tipping had been trained that the first bomb is not necessarily the only one. Sometimes terrorists use a first explosion to attract police and civilians to the site, and then set off a second explosion to kill them. There were grave fears that a second device could go off at any time. Nonetheless, Tipping, with a line tied to his waist so that he could be pulled out if anything went wrong, approached the blazing epicentre. He was fed a long line of fire hose by firemen keeping a safe distance from the blaze. As he got closer, Tipping could see detonators scattered across the ground - he knew that these were the source of the smaller explosions after the initial bomb. Tipping was careful not to tread on any of the detonators. If he did and one exploded, he could lose a foot.

  Once he was close enough, Tipping blasted the fierce fires with the fire hose until they sizzled into smoke and steam, and the immediate danger was lessened. As soon as the fire was extinguished, the SOG examined the surrounding areas for any other explosives. There was always a likelihood that part of the bomb had failed to detonate and the danger after the initial explosion was very real. Members of the SOG are specially trained in explosives - they knew what they were looking for. Combing the area for a second bomb, the men failed to find one but there were still a number of live detonators as well as sticks of gelignite that hadn't exploded. The findings removed any doubt as to whether the explosion was accidental or deliberate. Someone had planted a car bomb right outside the Russell Street police headquarters.

  Within an hour, the area was evacuated, all the injured had been taken to hospital, and the surrounding streets had been sealed off. As the news footage flashed onto televisions all over the country, Carl Donadio's parents, Bev and Vic, watched the unfolding drama from their Ballarat home. Bev turned to Vic and told him that she knew Carl had been injured in the explosion. She could feel it in her bones. Not long after, their phone rang...

  Suddenly every car parked in the city seemed suspicious and members of the SOG had to check out one report - among many - of an old car parked in McKenzie Street with no registration plates and the keys in the ignition. Some people fled the city while others stayed to watch the drama unfold.

  After the initial scene containment by the SOG, the first people called to the bomb site were the crime scene examiners. The initial call-out went to the new Victoria Police State Forensic Science Laboratory in the north-eastern suburb of Macleod. Police crime scene examiners had operated from Macleod since 1983 and the rest of the lab workers were slated to move into the new buildings in a couple of month's time - for the present, they were still in the old lab in Spring Street in the city.

  The first indication that a major incident had occurred at Russell Street came over the police radio and was quickly followed by a call from Spring Street requiring the crime scene examiners to attend. At the time, protocols dictated that crime scene examiners worked in pairs, but it was obvious from early reports, that this was an all-hands-on-deck job. Every examiner on duty piled into the unmarked forensics van loaded with equipment and headed towards the
city.

  Sergeant John Moushall was the senior officer on duty; the rest of the crime scene examiners were senior constables: Wayne Ashley, Allan Nilon, Steve Spargo, Peter Guerin and Dave Royal. On the trip to the bomb-site, the police officers could only speculate as to what they would find when they go there. They knew that a number of people had been injured, they knew that the Russell Street headquarters had been damaged, and they knew that communications had been affected because D-24's visual display units had broken down in the force of the blast and the subsequent power failure. The lines of communications had been disabled until the emergency generator kicked in, and even now, were not running at full strength. Windows at D-24 had been shattered and the only things that saved the operators inside from flying shards of glass were the heavy drapes that covered the windows.

  En route, the crime scene examiners listened to frantic calls over the police radios. Breathless officers shouted communications back and forth. To the trained examiners, these panicked communications could sometimes be unreliable, but from as far away as Fitzroy, they could see the thick black smoke hanging over the city leaving them in no doubt that they would have their work cut out for them. Without the benefit of lights and sirens, the unmarked van got stuck in the bottle-neck of traffic into the city and the officers had time to ponder this attack on their turf. Someone had targeted them.

  When they finally made it through the traffic, the crime scene van headed straight for the command post which had been set up on the corner of Latrobe Street and Exhibition - far enough away from the bomb site to be considered safe. Even so, that area of Latrobe Street was strewn with bits of rubber, metal, bricks and glass.