by Malcolm Knox
And in October 2005, St Vincent’s opened a new facility in Hudson’s department: the Psychiatric Emergency Care Centre (PECC), a six-bed facility specifically for non-acute drug-affected patients.
Dr Peter McGeorge, director of mental health services at St Vincent’s, said PECC would accept patients who would usually have to sit in the emergency department while the broken legs and car accident victims were given priority.
‘What tends to happen at present is they get discharged without being sorted out as well as they could be,’ he said. ‘So they’ll get a better quality of management and they’re not occupying space that could be used by others.’
The PECC rooms are spartan, without anything that can be seriously damaged if patients lash out. The beds don’t have sharp edges and there is extra padding on hard surfaces. Duress alarms alert security staff, who sit next door. Each PECC room is monitored on closed-circuit TV. Almost immediately, 90 per cent of methamphetamine cases were put into the PECC rooms until the drug’s effects wore off.
The following year, at Gorman House at St Vincent’s and at John Hunter, twenty-bed detoxification wards were established to treat a problem that was not yet abating. Nurses at the James Fletcher Hospital in Newcastle had briefly refused to admit any more patients suffering from drug psychoses, so hard were they to handle. Other hospitals around the country, whether by setting up new units or re-purposing old ones, were learning that patients affected by ice needed a unique kind of treatment. South Australian hospitals, discovering that a quarter of all intoxicated emergency patients were on methamphetamine, segregated these patients from others in designated ‘quiet rooms’ away from public areas. The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne used special rooms, which were empty but for a foam mattress, for young patients affected by drugs or alcohol, and Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital had since 2002 been using ‘behavioural assessment rooms’ to calm psychotic and other hard-to-handle patients. At the Gold Coast Hospital, where as many as five medical staff were needed at once to restrain patients having psychotic episodes on ice, specially designed rooms with foam furniture and reinforced walls were used from mid-2006.
David Spain, the deputy director of the hospital’s emergency department, said: ‘We have furniture which is made out of foam so they can’t throw it at people or at windows or the doors. There’s usually a chair and bed we have in there. The walls have been reinforced because they continually were smashed by fists or feet.
‘I’ve been here 25 years. We used to see drug-induced psychosis very rarely when I first graduated. They used to be a very small percentage but now 30 to 50 per cent of the people who present through the emergency department with psychiatric illness have drug-related problems. So it has been a dramatic and unexpected upswing.’
Along with the Pharmacy Guild’s Project STOP, the hospitals’ initiatives were Australia’s first concerted institutional response to the ice problem. Later, ambulance and paramedic services were to follow the same course, introducing ice-specific guidelines for officers, including the administration of the sedative Midazolam for ice-psychotics from September 2006.
‘This Midazolam is great stuff,’ one ambulance paramedic told the Australian. ‘All we need now is a better delivery system . . . like a shotgun. Daktari-style tranquilliser darts.’
Gallows humour aside, no longer was it acceptable to fob off crystal meth as the same old drug as speed. It wasn’t, and it never had been.
The criminal justice system, meanwhile, was having to make its own adjustments.
Real drug education is street drug education. Users get to know the effects of a drug before anyone else does, and the mythology of excess spreads quickly. In 2003 and 2004, the horror stories of ice hadn’t been broadcast to the extent that they have now; consequently, ice users didn’t often know what they were fooling with. When those incautious users were petty criminals, their crimes were soon far from petty.
CB and IM, two young men from New South Wales, hadn’t learnt yet. The consequences of their lack of education were tragic. CB had grown up in Murrurundi, the eldest of four children, and then in the Taree–Wingham area. He suffered from a reading disability that left him four or five years behind his schoolmates. Victimised, he found a ready recourse and sanctuary in drugs.
He was expelled from Chatham High School, in Taree, for possession of cannabis when he was in year seven. Through his early teens, CB was expelled from a further two high schools for disruptive behaviour, truancy and using drugs and alcohol.
When CB was around fifteen, his father noticed that he had some unexplained funds. CB said that he had been sexually molested by a male friend of the family, who had given him hush money. A fight ensued, and CB left home. His father seemed to take the side of the family friend, who accused CB of making his story up. It was at this point that the teenager graduated from alcohol and cannabis to harder drugs, including amphetamines. At sixteen, when he left home, he set off on a six-year collection of criminal convictions, mainly for stealing, break and enter, and larceny.
CB’s parents tried their best, but he was even less controllable after he left home, showing no sign of being able to live independently or hold a job. Several times his parents received calls from hospitals saying CB had been admitted for psychotic or suicidal incidents. He would be put in a hospital room where he would sing and dance one minute, and rage the next, smashing the walls with his hands. At his lowest, he would moan that he wished he had never been born. He tried to hang himself in 2000, when he was eighteen. His parents didn’t know with any certainty where he slept at night.
IM was a year older than CB, having been born in 1981 at Blacktown Hospital in Sydney’s west. IM’s father, a migrant from former Yugoslavia, was frequently unemployed and a violent alcoholic who beat his three children, of whom IM was the youngest. Like CB, IM was sexually abused by a male family friend; when he told his father about it, his father beat him, refusing to believe it. IM was placed in foster care as a young child, but at the age of seven was returned to his family when they moved from Sydney to the Newcastle area.
Nothing much improved for IM. He had no attention for his lessons and wagged school more often than not. The only time he received consistent schooling was while he was in juvenile detention centres. When he was eleven, his abuser tried to rape him in bushland but was interrupted by two passers-by. IM said he was happy to be sent away from his family, ‘to get away from the abuse’.
At twelve, IM left school and began supporting himself through crime. Over the next decade he picked up convictions for armed robbery, common assault, malicious damage, stealing cars, damaging property, break and enter, larceny, intimidating behaviour and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Like CB, IM used cannabis and alcohol from an early age and harder drugs from around thirteen. Heroin was his favourite; he said it made him ‘a nicer person’. After a prison stint in 2001, he became an addict, using as much as a gram a day.
On the mid-north coast of New South Wales, crystal meth was known as ‘gas’. IM had first taken gas at fourteen, and continued to use it whenever it was available. Unlike heroin, which brought him down with terrible flu-like withdrawal symptoms within a couple of days, gas would keep him up for two weeks at a time before he crashed. But he saw it as a nastier drug than heroin. The gas, he would tell a health worker, ‘eats me away’. He would forget meals, and become malnourished. He was also beset by a dark and violent paranoia.
This was a particular problem in his home life. From about the age of fourteen, IM had a girlfriend. Around 2003 they had a son. He alternated periods of loving-kindness with terrible neglect. For ten years he had suffered flashbacks to the sexual abuse, resulting in nightmares, poor sleep, anxiety, an inability to trust people, and a sense of despair about his future that amounted to depression.
IM and CB had a lot in common. Given their shared backgrounds, it was natural for the pair to become friends. They did crime together and drugs together. As horr
endous as their lives may appear from the outside, to themselves they were cowboys, good-time guys who loved to get high and go out stealing. It was their way of life. The roller-coaster of moods was something they, like most drug users, accepted. In a terrible way, there is a stoic resilience to the addict’s life, a way of absorbing fate, and a discipline, knowing the ups and downs are tied to, and may be alleviated by, the use of a drug.
In 2004, CB and IM were living in Newcastle. IM was living at his mother’s house in Windale with his girlfriend and their baby son. He was using ice and heroin most days. CB was drifting from place to place.
IM’s dealer was a man named Gavin Atkin, who lived in a flat above a restaurant in Maitland Road, Mayfield. It’s a tough part of Newcastle. The back of the block shared a carpark with a tough pub, the Beauford Hotel. Atkin had been selling ice for a couple of years, and he took a shine to CB, inviting him to move into the flat. Atkin dealt mostly from home, though he also did deliveries to some of his clients. To prepare himself when buyers came to his flat, he had a floodlight and surveillance camera set up over his back stairs; he could watch a television monitor inside the flat to see who was coming up.
On the day of 9 August 2004, Atkin went fishing in his aluminium tinny. He arrived home at around 2.15 am, and sat down to watch television for a while.
CB wasn’t home. Things hadn’t been too good between him and Gavin Atkin. CB was constantly short of cash and buying his ice on tick, and Atkin had started leaning on him to pay up. Atkin had threatened to harm CB, and accused him of smashing the window of his car. They traded abusive text messages, CB calling Atkin a ‘paranoid cunt’.
The night of 9 August, CB was with IM at IM’s brother’s home in Gateshead. They were injecting ice and obsessing over how to clear the debt to Atkin while still keeping him open as their supplier. IM’s brother lent them $100 to pay Atkin, and a further $30 for a taxi, which they booked in a false name and caught to Mayfield at around 3.45 am. They got out at a BP service station within walking distance of Atkin’s flat.
CB entered via the back stairs while IM waited outside. They had injected up to three grams of ice in the previous 24 hours, and were raging.
Atkin was lying in front of the television, and blew up when he saw CB. In the heat of the moment, CB decided not to give him the $100 and instead just bash him and steal whatever drugs and money were in the flat. He hit Atkin with a steel bar and a pool cue, which broke as he swung it across the dealer’s head. He kept smashing Atkin until the older man fell to the floor, groaning. Atkin would suffer brain bruising and skull fractures, leaving him permanently impaired and unable to remember much about the night.
Hearing the commotion, IM went up into the flat. As Atkin lay there suffering, CB and IM ripped a safe out of the bedroom wardrobe and made to leave. But in a terrible twist of fate, at around 4.30 am a visitor arrived.
Garry Sansom, 33, was living with friends nearby in Dora Street, Mayfield. Sansom had hurt his left arm and shoulder in an accident, and was now surviving on a disability pension. He had a partner and child, but he and his partner had separated. He was an occasional methamphetamine user. His bad luck was that Gavin Atkin was his dealer, and that he really needed some drugs in the early hours of 10 August.
CB and IM were inside the flat, debating whether they would steal any more of Atkin’s things. They had Atkin’s car keys and would leave in his Ford Telstar. Atkin was lying on the floor, blood streaming from his head, groaning between bouts of unconsciousness.
Then CB glanced at the television monitor and saw someone coming up the back stairs. He raced to the door as it opened.
‘What’s going on here?’ Garry Sansom said, peering over CB’s shoulder at the havoc inside.
‘Nothing, Garry. It’s me,’ CB said.
Sansom kept trying to see inside the flat.
CB panicked. He grabbed Sansom by the neck and pulled him inside before throwing him down on the tiled floor. Picking up the metal bar with which he’d hit Atkin, he pounded Sansom around the head and face, hitting him five or six times. IM joined in with a Stilson wrench, pummelling Sansom, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Later, both CB and IM would struggle to articulate why they had gone so far. ‘I just started freaking out,’ IM said. ‘I was scattered to the max,’ said CB. As we have seen, the influence of ice had the capacity to turn such common brawls murderous, depriving the user of any sense of limits. An act of violence while on crystal meth seems to burst boundaries; the perpetrator keeps on hitting and hitting, not knowing why, just going on beyond any purpose or restraint, repeating the action as mindlessly as playing cards or popping Sudafeds out of blister packs.
Another common feature of these crimes is the activity and sense of intent applied to the cover-up. After beating Sansom, IM and CB injected some of the ice they’d stolen, and left in Atkin’s Telstar. Some way down the road in Broadmeadow, they realised they had forgotten the stolen safe, so they drove back to the Mayfield flat. Stepping over Sansom, who by now was unconscious and almost certainly dead, and passing Atkin, who was either passed out or groaning incoherently, CB picked up the safe and left again.
The pair drove to the Charlestown area, where a friend lived in Warners Bay Road. They dropped off the safe and some fishing gear they’d stolen for good measure, and drove the Telstar out into bushland near Crescent Road, where they set it alight.
After walking back to Warners Bay Road, they set to work opening the safe with a grinder and an iron bar. CB said to one of the house’s occupants, ‘we did a rort’. The occupant noticed blood on CB’s clothes and gave him a wide berth.
After stealing two bracelets out of the safe and leaving the fishing gear in the house, CB and IM left. They separated, IM picking up his girlfriend and son and going down to Sydney, where he would move from place to place in the Mount Druitt area in the next three weeks. CB stayed in Newcastle, and later on 10 August returned to the house on Warners Bay Road. By this time, the police had linked the burnt-out car to that address, and were waiting for him. They arrested him as he arrived.
IM was arrested on 29 August, when he returned to Newcastle. Initially, he and CB would both deny any involvement in the attacks on Atkin and Sansom. CB said he was in his bedroom listening to music when he heard an intruder come in, and he’d run away after finding Atkin and Sansom beaten in the living room. IM maintained different stories in different interviews: he had never been there, he had been outside the flat but had no involvement in the attacks—in fact pulling CB away from his victims—and saying he was with CB when Sansom arrived but had nothing to do with the Atkin attack. He told police: ‘Oh, we, we did go there, not to rob anyone, I’ll be honest. I was going there to get gas, all right. I went in there and CB, they started punchin’ on, right, and, but the other poor bloke [Sansom], all right, little bit, all right. I, I, I didn’t go, I didn’t hit him, I swear, eh. But [CB] hit him with, with the chair, mate, I swear, the chair, right. There, there was a bar stool there, he wouldn’t leave the cunt alone, mate, wouldn’t leave it alone, you know, you know what I mean. I, I’m sorry I lied about fuckin’ gettin’ in that car, you know what I mean, I was scared, you know what I mean . . .’
In jail, though, IM boasted to other prisoners that he’d killed ‘two rock spiders’. He said that an informant, whose contact with police had led to the arrests, was ‘a dead man. I am going to cave his head in like I did the other two’.
Far from showing remorse, CB and IM were gloating about the attacks—unaware they were being recorded. Police taped a chilling phone conversation between the pair:
IM: . . . that’s where Gavin is, eh, down Fletcher [hospital], eh.
CB: Is he?
IM: Yeah, bro.
CB: How come?
IM: He’s got, like, a four-year-old, bro. I didn’t want to tell you that, eh.
CB: He what?
IM: I didn’t want to say that, eh. I was going to keep it in the dark, eh.
CB: What is he?
IM: He’s got a mind of a four-year-old, eh.
CB: Good. That’s good.
IM: Yeah, OK. Yeah. He’s suppose . . . but, you know what I mean, that’s where he is, James Fletcher.
CB: Yeah.
IM: Yeah, when me girl told me, you know what I mean?
CB: No, I feel sorry for the cunt, really man.
IM: So do I, bro, I wish the fuck we weren’t fuckin’ that scattered now, bro.
CB: I was fuckin’ off me head, wasn’t I?
IM: Yeah, that’s it, bro, you know, it took both of us . . . fuck.
CB: But he said, Gav rung us up and threatened us. You know what I mean?
IM: Yeah, yeah, he did, mate.
CB: That’s what I mean, mate . . . so what if I smash a drug dealer.
IM: Mm, that’s it—
CB: I’m doin’ society a favour.
IM: That’s it.
CB: Mate, that’s what I was saying . . . I should be given a medal for fuckin’, for knocking drug dealer scum up.
CB: Yeah, I’m fuckin’ deadset fuckin’ sorry, it’s my fault, man, this fuckin’, it all happened, brother, my fault, man, I instigated it, I fuckin’ premeditated it, you know.
IM: Don’t worry, mate. We’re in together, bro.
CB: Yeah.
IM: Yeah. Eh, I deadset . . . I deadset, didn’t want it to go down like that, eh, bro.
CB: What?
IM: I deadset didn’t want it to happen like that, eh.
CB: No, I didn’t want it to happen like that.
IM: That cunt, that was a mistake, that cunt, admit it, didn’t deserve to fuckin’ die for it.
CB: Just the wrong place at the wrong time.
IM: That’s it, man, fuck. Deadset, I fuckin’ pay for remorse, eh, I want remorse, mate, that, you know what I mean, that hurts me, brother.
CB: It does, man.
IM: All right. I’m tellin’ ya, eh, I don’t care if it’s recorded or not, you know but fuckin’, it hurts, bro. Eh. Takin’, takin’ a cunt’s life with fuckin’ two kids and, you know what I mean, bro?
