LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Here is a story about the death in custody of a man sent to jail for traffic offences whose last fateful hours in prison were caught on camera.

7.30 has surveillance footage from Grafton jail in northern New South Wales that reveals what happened to Ian Klum as the fatally injured man sought help from prison officers.

The pictures show how the 52-year-old father asked for treatment but was instead was left to crawl from cell to cell, all the time haemorrhaging to death.

Tim Palmer reports, and a warning that this story contains some strong language.

TIM PALMER, REPORTER: In Grafton jail's five wing in June last year and the prisoner on the floor has reported an assault only to be left to crawl to another cell.

JAIMIE KLUM, DAUGHTER: How can anyone treat someone that way? ... They look sick and you just let them crawl across the floor.

TIM PALMER: 52-year-old Ian Klum wouldn't survive his injuries, and what happened to him in jail is now the subject of an inquest.

Ian Klum's relatives say he was the free spirit of the family.

The father of two had suffered in recent years, breaking his hip in a paragliding accident and suffering a stroke. He'd also endured depression that had seen him three times in psychiatric care. After repeatedly being picked up for driving without a licence, in May last year Ian Klum went before a magistrate hoping a psychiatric report might keep him from prison. It wasn't to be.

JAIMIE KLUM: He just brushed it off and told him no prison.

TIM PALMER: Ian Klum was sent to Grafton jail for six months for traffic offences.

JAIMIE KLUM: Dad shouldn't have been in prison in the first place.

TIM PALMER: On the night of June 9th last year the prisoners in number five wing were locked up as usual. What happened next between Ian Klum and another prisoner in cell 219 is the subject of a police investigation.

Just before half past two in the morning the silence was split by what's known as a knock-up call. A heavily bleeding Ian Klum hit the emergency intercom in cell 219. He might have hoped he'd be taken to hospital.

PRISON OFFICER: What's up?

IAN KLUM: Uhhh, I'm so sick.

PRISON OFFICER: What's the matter with ya?

IAN KLUM: I'm bleeding.

PRISON OFFICER: Bleeding where?

IAN KLUM: From my mouth and my nose.

PRISON OFFICER: I'll let the boss know.

TIM PALMER: The prison's closed circuit video shows three officers responding to the call. Their response has infuriated Ian Klum's family. When Ian Klum's cell door is opened, the prisoner slumps out on to the floor, but it appears no attempt is made to examine him for injuries and at no time do any of the guards go into the cell to ask what happened or to examine what is now considered a crime scene. They would have found a large amount of blood.

At one point one of them tries to close the cell door to find the stricken prisoner's body is blocking it. The officer appears to use his leg to twice slide Ian Klum across the floor out of the way.

BRETT COLLINS, JUSTICE ACTION: The callous indifference with which the man is then - he collapses out on the ground and is then just shifted with his foot as though he's just a piece of rubbish on the ground and then forced to crawl across the ground. I mean, this is - it really establishes how little respect there is for them as human beings.

JAIMIE KLUM: I'd see that as being treated like an animal in that situation. I don't find that a very human reaction to someone who looks hurt and sick.

TIM PALMER: The three officers open another cell and gesture to the fatally injured Ian Klum to move to it.

JAIMIE KLUM: He had a brain haemorrhage and you just - crawling across the floor you can imagine how much pain he'd be going through.

TIM PALMER: The video shows Ian Klum beginning his agonising crawl towards cell 225. One of the officers would later make a statement that the officers had helped Klum to the cell. At this week's inquest he was made to watch this video and later conceded that statement was wrong.

The dying man is then left alone for nine minutes before the officers' return. This time the intercom system records one of the prison officers speaking to Ian Klum at the cell door. Only now do the officers see the extent of Ian Klum's injury, but officer Matt Barnett, on seeing Mr Klum's bloody head, suggests the prisoner has somehow caused it since being moved.

PRISON OFFICER: Yeah, what's the matter?

PRISON OFFICER II: You didn't have that on you when we f****** brought you over here. Get up now. No, get up.

IAN KLUM: I'm spinning out.

PRISON OFFICER II: Get up! Get up now, come on.

IAN KLUM: Sorry, I can't I'm spinning out.

PRISON OFFICER II: Stand up.

IAN KLUM: I can't get up.

PRISON OFFICER II: Stand up.

IAN KLUM: I'm spinning out.

PRISON OFFICER II: Stand up. Now walk.

TIM PALMER: Prison officer Matt Barnett told the inquest this week that he didn't intend to be disrespectful in the way he spoke to the dying man.

Finally, a nurse is called into the jail and the officers half carry the slumping figure of Ian Klum downstairs to the prison's detox unit. As Ian Klum's life bled away, he made a final call on the intercom to receive this response:

PRISON OFFICER: The nurse is coming in to see ya ... so be quiet. There's other people down here asleep and you wait till the nurse get in.

JAIMIE KLUM: He knows in himself that he needs help. He knows how sick he is. He just didn't get taken seriously at all.

TIM PALMER: When the on-call nurse arrived tests were done to assess Ian Klum's condition. It wasn't until after 5:00 in the morning, more than three hours after his original distress call, that Ian Klum was taken to Grafton Hospital just a few metres across the road from the jail. He had emergency surgery there before being flown to Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital. Four days later, Ian Klum died.

Brett Collins says his 30 years of agitating for the rights of prisoners tells him that the way the system dealt with Ian Klum is only unusual in that it's been exposed on video.

BRETT COLLINS: Any suggestion at all that they're sort of normal human beings with entitlement to respect by the prison officers I'm afraid just is not part of the prisoner culture.

TIM PALMER: For now, prison officer Rick Woelfl remains suspended. His fellow officers on the night, Matt Barnett and David Pearcy, are on extended leave. When the inquest resumes next March it will continue to look at just how much different prison and health officials knew about Ian Klum's medical condition on the night of the injury.

It will also determine whether the anti-coagulant drugs he was prescribed left him in a critically vulnerable condition, and it will examine how the prison officers treated the crime scene and whether that may have robbed the family of the chance of finding out what happened to Ian Klum in cell 219.

LEIGH SALES: Lawyers for the three prison officers and the Corrective Services Department wanted the coroner to place a non-publication order on the video footage in that story, fearing it would go viral. You've now seen why. Tim Palmer was the reporter there.