On January 6 2015, WA Police arrived via helicopter to the remote outstation of Wungu in the East Kimberley to investigate the death of a 20-year-old Aboriginal man, Cody Carter, who had died the day before.

The officers found the Carter family in a bad situation: traumatised, low on food supplies and stranded. Their Toyota had become bogged in black soil a few kilometres from the house shortly before Cody's death.

The family begged to be flown out of there. Sorry, this audio has expired Listen to Harry Hayes' full investigation

WA police took their statements, loaded Cody's body into the helicopter and flew away, leaving the Carter family stranded.

"If it were a white family [with] no food, no electricity, with a dead body, I'm sure they'd be rescued straight away," Cody's uncle Cameron Sturt told Awaye!.

That's an accusation Kimberley Police Superintendent Allan Adams may be forced to address today when he meets Gwen Sturt, Cody's mother, to try to explain the decisions made by police two years ago.

Wungu and the Carter family

The view of Wungu from its water tank. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

Wungu is 70 kilometres south-east of Halls Creek, part of the traditional lands of the Nyining people.

Cody's grandmother Sandra was born at Wungu, when the homestead formed part of the Flora Valley cattle station. In 1987, after the cattle station moved, Nyining people successfully applied to have three houses built there.

Though eight other members of the Carter family were staying at Wungu in January 2015, Sandra was the only permanent resident.

The death of Cody Carter

Nine kilometres of black soil road, notorious for bogging cars in the wet, lie between Wungu and the main road to Halls Creek.

Usually during the wet season the Carters would head into Halls Creek to buy supplies every week or so, but in early January 2015, severe weather trapped them at the outstation.

Food was running low, but with more storms forecast they made the decision to attempt a run into town through the black soil.

The Carter family on the porch at Wungu. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

They were only two kilometres from the house when they got bogged. Then, suddenly, Cody died. The cause of death remains unclear two years later, as the coroner's findings are yet to be released.

Gwen Sturt, her husband Calvin and her son Troy struggled to get Cody's body back to shelter.

"We said, we gotta get him back to the house. We was all weak, crying, sore," said Gwen.

Cody's eldest brother Troy ran back to the house to find a wheelbarrow, but it too got bogged. He returned to the family with a bed frame.

"We had to carry him across the bush here, straight across the bush. It was dark around here, raining, muddy," he said.

They finally got back to the house around midnight and laid Cody's body in his room.

The arrival of the police

"They just left us here stranded." Gwen Sturt will meet with WA Police today. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

WA Police arrived by helicopter at 9:30am the next morning.

The police officers took statements from the Carters and investigated the scene.

Some time was spent looking for Cody's partner Emma, who had started walking down the road towards Halls Creek earlier that morning. When the police located her, she was exhausted. They flew her to Halls Creek Hospital and then returned to Wungu.

The officers loaded Cody's body into the helicopter.

"I wanted to know where my son was, laying on other people's lap?" said Gwen.

"No loved one in the chopper? Not even one?

"One wasn't gonna jump on and leave the rest behind. We all wanted to go. We was all blood connected to him."

Then the helicopter flew off with only WA Police officers and Cody's body inside.

"They came out there and said, 'We're here to do our job,'" said Gwen. "But we was ringing from last night for us as well for help, to get out of here.

"We was telling everybody on the phone what we was going through: our Toyota's bogged, we got no food.

"We was begging on the side as well, for help ... They just left us here stranded."

Left behind

Gwen Sturt's husband Calvin sits in the family Land Cruiser. Robert, six, stands in the tray. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

Chantelle Green, an old friend of Gwen's, drove to Halls Creek airport to see the helicopter land.

After police unloaded Cody's body, she was shocked to see the helicopter take off and fly in the direction of Kununurra rather than back to Wungu.

"The helicopter was going back to Kununurra and they couldn't go out and get them guys, so we all had to start rushing around and think about how we gonna go out and get them now," she said.

"They just left us high and dry."

Gwen's brother Cameron Sturt, who was in Halls Creek, organised a group of extended family to drive into Wungu.

The Halls Creek police, concerned about extreme storms and flooding, initially tried to stop the rescue attempt.

"I told them, I know that place like the back of my hand in the wet," said Cameron. "They said, 'Oh well, you can give it a crack and see how you go.'"

SES officials, who were also concerned about a family rescue attempt, informed Cameron over the phone that SES would make a rescue attempt the next day.

"I was thinking: they haven't got any fuel, no food, no generator: they gonna leave it for tomorrow?"

The rescue

Alan Sturt, part of the rescue mob, stands on the main road to Halls Creek. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

Meanwhile the situation was becoming increasingly desperate at Wungu.

Police had instructed the family to use the air conditioner to keep Cody's body cool the night before and as a result they had run out of generator fuel.

As the night of January 6 set in, the whole family, including Sandra, 60, and her six-year-old grandson Robert, decided to risk walking into the incoming storm, towards the main road.

"So we walked, we walked with plastic bags, we had three dogs, we had a rabbit in a cage" Gwen Sturt recalled. "It was pitch black by then ... pouring rain, thunder, the sky was just black."

As they walked, the rising water was up to their knees in some places.

"We never seen this place like that in our life… It was just too much rain.

It was just so scary… at one point it was stinging on our skin from that rain, stinging us, flogging us.

"We had to shelter in the trees, just to get away from that for a while, then it would settle down and we'd start walking again."

Cameron's car got bogged shortly after he and the rescue mob turned into the Wungu road, about nine kilometres from the house. He and his son Ty, his father Alan and cousin Jeanette struck out on foot.

Slogging most of the way down the muddy road, they met the Carters coming in the other direction.

Robert and Troy in the car at Wungu. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

Doubling back towards the cars, Cameron held up the rear of the family group, virtually carrying Sandra.

"I had to walk with mum, because she was real slow," he recalled.

The torrential rain had flooded a creek: "We tried walking across, the water just swept her feet straight under her. She nearly got swept away."

They made it back to the rescue cars in the middle of the night, but couldn't get back to Halls Creek because the road had been cut off by a major river, Palm Springs, which had risen since the rescue party crossed it on the way to Wungu hours before. All they could do was wait.

"We spent the night there, crying, screaming in the car," said Gwen. "Couldn't sleep. Couldn't eat. They had food for us, all of our stomachs just closed down."

Safe in Halls Creek

The Carters finally made it back to Halls Creek on the morning of January 7. They say neither the WA Police nor the SES made contact to confirm their safety or discuss the planned rescue.

Cameron Sturt still wonders what went wrong.

"I drove all the way from Derby to rescue them. [The police] stuffed me around all day when I could have rescued them during the day, not at night. Not at one o'clock in the morning."

"Why did it take two days to get nothing out of them?"

What duty of care do the police have?

Sarouche Razi, the principal solicitor at Kimberley Community Legal Services, heard the Carters' story while he was working for the Aboriginal Legal Service in Kununurra.

After meeting the family and gathering information, he lobbied for a Crime and Corruption Commission investigation into the matter, but the request was denied.

Instead, the WA Police appointed Inspector Peter Foley to run an internal investigation.

In response to Mr Razi's complaint, Foley wrote: "WA Police officers on the ground investigating the death of Mr Carter didn't deem any community members at immediate risk during their deployment to the community."

"'Rescuing people due to isolation caused by climactic and environmental conditions is not a role for WA Police."

The East Kimberley landscape. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

"After hearing the community's concerns that they wished to leave the community due to the fact that they were low on food supplies, WA Police contacted the Kimberley District Office of the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) to facilitate the supply of provisions."

The DFES are responsible for the deployment of the SES.

However, WA Police assistant commissioner for regional Australia, Murray Smalpage, told Awaye! that it is the police's role to evacuate people who are "critically at risk of perishing".

For his part, the family's lawyer Mr Razi believes the police had a duty of care, and that the risks posed by inadequate food supplies, bad weather and the trauma of having a close relative die would have been obvious to the officers interviewing them on the ground at Wungu.

But do the police consider psychological trauma and isolation when assessing risk?

"The difficulty that you have with psychological trauma is, how do you assess that?" said Assistant Commissioner Smalpage. "What training do the police have to assess psychological trauma?"

That's a good question.

In pursuit of justice

Robert and Troy stand by the creek at Wungu. ( ABC RN: Harry Hayes )

Mr Razi believes that, as Indigenous Australians, the Carters have not had their concerns taken seriously by the SES or the WA Police.

"The family here had a genuine complaint that they should have been rescued, and the institutional failures don't allow a proper avenue for redress for them to say this wasn't right," he said.

"The suffering that they were already going through was worsened to a really large extent because of the police conduct."

Awaye! repeatedly sought comment from the SES, who declined to be interviewed or issue a statement.

Gwen Sturt and Mr Razi are scheduled to meet Kimberley Police Superintendent Allan Adams today. WA Police proposed the meeting after learning that the family had spoken to the ABC.

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