Edwina Neale tells inquest she did not see fall linked to Day’s death, and wasn’t alerted by her unsteadiness

The sergeant in charge of the Castlemaine police cells on the day Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day was arrested has rejected a suggestion it was “criminally negligent” to extend the time between physical welfare checks, an inquest has heard.

Sergeant Edwina Neale was the custody supervisor on 5 December, 2017, when Day, 55, was arrested and put in custody for public drunkenness.

She said she did not observe Day fall over in custody, and particularly did not see her fall and hit her forehead at 4.51pm. If she had seen the fall, she said, she would have gone to the cell and checked on Day herself.

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As it was she did not go to the cells between 3.59pm, when Day was checked in, and 8.03pm, when she went to wake Day, noticed a bruise on her forehead, and called an ambulance.

The fall at 4.51pm, the inquest has heard, caused the haemorrhage that led to her death 17 days later.

Neale was shown CCTV footage of Day in the cells. She agreed that after 5pm it appeared she could not move her right arm, and said that was not noticed at the time.

She said footage from before 5pm did show that Day was more unsteady on her feet than she had been at the charge counter, just over an hour earlier, but that she was “behaving as a conscious, breathing, drunk.”

Peter Morrissey SC, the counsel for the Day family, said that Day appeared to be “at risk of falling and cracking their head” given her unsteadiness on her feet.

“Well, we found that later, yes,” Neale said.

She continued: “I would say that all drunks are at risk of falling and cracking their head in a police cell and at that point ... her behaviour doesn’t alert me particularly.”

Neale said she had initially ordered that Day be subject to a physical check every 20 minutes — more frequently than the 30 minutes required under police guidelines — because as an Aboriginal woman she was “more vulnerable” in custody.

At some point she changed that to a physical check, which involved walking to the cell and obtaining a meaningful verbal response from Day, every 40 minutes, with a check via the CCTV cameras every 20 minutes.

“That decision was criminally negligent, do you agree or disagree,” Morrissey said.

“I totally disagree,” Neale said.

“In fact at that point she was bleeding to death, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t know that.”

The decision to extend the checks was made after the watch house keeper, Danny Wolters, told her that Day would “get up and become agitated and ask when she could go home” every time he performed a physical check, and that he had felt conducting such frequent checks was “disturbing her.”

Wolters first checked on Day at 4.50pm, leaving just 30 seconds before the devastating fall. Neale said she thinks the decision to extend the time between physical checks was made shortly after, as the next check was not for another 44 minutes.

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CCTV footage of that check, shown to Neale in court, shows that Wolters and another officer, the leading senior constable Wayne Cairnes, stood at the window to the cell for about six seconds before leaving. Day did not get up from the bed or appear to physically respond while they were there.

There is no audio recorded on the footage, but the note Wolters made in the custody log states he had obtained a verbal response.

Day stands up several seconds after Wolters has left, apparently in response to him speaking to her, and then falls.

Neale said she was not watching the CCTV monitor on her desk to cover the period when Wolters was walking from his desk to the cell. “No one is going to sit and watch her continually,” she said.

Later, she questioned whether the bruise, which she said was the size of a 20c piece, should be called a head injury. “I don’t consider that a head injury ... she had a bruise in the middle of her forehead,” she said. She said she only learned that Day had died from a blow to the head in custody, and not a pre-existing brain bleed, six months ago.

Audio of the triple-0 call, played in court, suggests that Wolters told paramedics that Day was checked and gave a verbal response every 20 minutes, rather than every 40; that she had fallen just once at 7pm from the bed to the floor; and that she had got up and walked around immediately after the fall.

The first paramedic, Lisa Harrop, arrived at 8.25pm, and two others arrived at 8.50pm. Day is not seen leaving the cell on the stretcher until 8.55pm, some 61 minutes after the bruise was first noticed.