In a police watch house in Western Australia, an Aboriginal man warns that he's going to kill himself. An officer ignores his plea. Later, she laughs about his death.
WARNING: This story contains names and images of First Nations people who have died, and details about suicide and self-harm.
The last time Linton Ryan's family saw him, he had taken his nieces and nephews to the oval to kick the footy around, and listen to music through a big boom box.
Linton would often visit his Aunty Jillian's place in Kalgoorlie and play with the children.
He was handy, and sometimes fixed broken bicycles for the kids to ride.
Later that afternoon, Linton was arrested.
Within a week, he was found dead in his cell, at the Eastern Goldfields Regional Prison.
Police had been warned Linton was going to kill himself. Like so many other prisoners before him, he was ignored.
He is now counted among the hundreds of Indigenous lives lost in custody.
But for those who loved him, his death will never be a number in a column.
Linton's life started — and ended — under the care of the state.
But his story began long before he was born.
His mother, Noongar Wongai woman Lynette McIntyre, is a survivor of the Stolen Generations, forcibly removed from her family as a child under government policies.
Lynette went on to endure domestic violence as a young adult and says she would steal cars to get arrested for reprieve.
Prison became her escape.
"I wanted to leave my partner … I just [did these things] to get away from him," she says.
Linton and his older brother Shannon were both put into state care as Lynette managed homelessness and alcoholism.
"I didn't have no home … I was just living pretty rough out on the streets," she says.
Shannon thinks back to his time in foster care with Linton with some guilt.
"When we got to the teenage years, the foster family weren't so great, so I had to run away," he says.
"I left. I couldn't … I had nowhere to take my brother with me."
Linton spent time in and out of prison and travelling around the state visiting family.
By his late 20s, the Noongar Wongai Adnyamathanha man had settled in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia — a colonial mining city built on gold.
The region is home to the Wongai or Wongatha people, whose connection to the land dates back thousands of years before European settlement.
Trucks line the streets powdered with red dust.
Barmaids in lingerie, known as skimpies, pour pints for locals and fly-in-fly-out workers clocking off their shifts from nearby mine sites.
On the edge of town, south-west of the main drag, is an abandoned rail yard.
Its cold concrete floors served as Linton's home in the final weeks of his life.
"A lot of people stayed with Linton, like about 12 people. It's all gone now," his cousin Kyvia Richards says.
He wanders through the derelict shed where Linton kept his clothes and a few possessions.
"He had a couple of new shoes, bought a big jacket," Kyvia says.
"He had a girlfriend.?She's not coming back no more."
?There's no electricity or running water, rusty metal pipes hang from the ceiling, and half the front door is missing.
Despite the harsh conditions, Kyvia remembers Linton always smiling.
"He'd laugh around, joke around," he says.
Linton spent a lot of time with his family at his Aunty Jillian's place.
"Our home was his home," she says.
"He laughed with us, he smiled with us … we spent most of our life with this young fella."
Jillian remembers Linton’s last visit in March this year — the last day any of his family would see him.
That afternoon, police arrest Linton after an altercation with his partner.
He's charged with aggravated assault occasioning bodily harm, and taken to the holding cells at the Kalgoorlie police station.
Linton, who lives with significant mental health conditions and has a history of self-harm, has smeared himself with faeces.
A solicitor from the Aboriginal Legal Service visits Linton just before his court hearing. By this point, Linton has cleaned himself up and wants to talk.
He has a massive gouge in his arm that hasn't been medically treated. The lawyer thinks it looks "very serious".
Linton tells the lawyer he doesn't want bail because he needs a break from his turbulent living situation.
He's too unwell to attend court, so the lawyer appears in his absence.
Six days later, Linton takes his own life in his prison cell.
News of the death travels fast, reaching a female constable who remembers an exchange she had with Linton in the police watch house.
The officer is young and relatively new to Western Australia. Her social media is full of snaps from her travels enjoying the pristine coastline.
After she hears about the death, she sends a quick voice note to a friend.
"I interviewed a man the other day, and he was like, 'I'm gonna kill myself'," she says in the recording, obtained by the ABC.
"And I was like, 'yeah whatever'. Put him in the cells. He went to prison the next day and then he killed himself."
She signs off the voice note with a giggle, "um, lol", then sends a follow-up message.
"Don't tell anyone that."
The ABC sent written questions to WA Police about the officer's conduct. In a statement, it confirmed the officer had been stood aside while an internal investigation takes place.
"Given the matter is now under investigation, it is not appropriate for police to make further comment at this time," the statement said.
A history of violence
Listening to the recording of this voice note about the death of her son, Lynette McIntyre's body tenses.
"I just feel so sick in the stomach while listening to that voice," she says.
"She shouldn't have said that … that woman should have got help."
Linton's brother's eyes widen.
"The prison and the police need to be held accountable. People just can't die in their custody, in their care," Shannon says.
For Linton's entire life, Aboriginal people have been dying in custody.
Australians were reckoning with an inflection point in the country's history before he was even born.
In 1983, 16-year-old , in WA's north-west.
His death became a nationwide symbol of injustice and oppression for First Nations people and helped spark the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
The commissioner found John Pat and several others had been caught up in a fight outside a pub with off-duty officers — one of whom provoked the altercation — when the boy sustained a head injury.
John Pat began losing consciousness shortly after he was arrested outside the pub.
The officers then assaulted him in the police station yard as he was being transferred to the lock-up.
One of the officers — who said he thought the boy was playing "doggo" or pretending to be unconscious — then dragged him to a cell, where he later died.
The five officers charged with John Pat's manslaughter were acquitted by an all-white jury, and the superintendent responsible for clearing them of internal discipline went on to serve as the state's police commissioner.
At the time of John Pat's death there were 10 officers in Roebourne. Officers told the commission they regularly patrolled areas where Aboriginal people congregated to demonstrate a police presence or "show the flag".
Records examined by the commission over a three-month period revealed 730 arrests were made and "virtually all" involved Aboriginal people.
The royal commission documented a society hostile towards First Nations people, with racist attitudes entrenched in legal, educational and welfare systems, and amongst authorities tasked with assisting Aboriginal communities.
Its report in 1991 — two years before Linton was born — detailed the lives of 99 Aboriginal people who died in custody, many whose lives mirrored Linton's own.
Almost half, like Linton, had been separated from their families as children.
About half had also interacted with the justice system by the time they were 15 years old — Linton was 12 at the time of his first arrest.
Nearly all of them, like Linton, were unemployed and had not completed high school.
Linton died at 31, just one year shy of the average age of death of the 99 people who died.
Thirty of the 99 deaths, like Linton, used hanging as a suicide method.
The royal commission's report included a recommendation to minimise hanging points in prison cells, but this has never been fully implemented.
When then-Aboriginal affairs minister Robert Tickner tabled the final report in parliament in 1991, he made it clear this was a pivotal moment for the nation.
"The report documents in a way never before achieved, the impact of European settlement on Australia's Indigenous peoples," he said.
"Their dispossession and subordination within a dominant and often hostile society … the development of racist attitudes both overt and hidden and the way in which these attitudes became institutionalised."
Policing in 'a war zone'
In the aftermath of John Pat's death, as racial and police tensions swelled, a young Aboriginal officer was deployed to Roebourne.
Former WA Police superintendent and Yawuru man Brian Wilkinson had only been part of the force for a few years at the time.
"Back then we described it as a war zone. The community was very, very upset with police," he says.
"There was a lot of Aboriginal people getting arrested, and charged, and I felt there had to be a better way of doing it.
"We started to embrace the culture and organised Aboriginal Police Olympics, I coached seven basketball teams — we realised that we were not going to arrest our way out of this problem."
Brian gradually carved out a career in the police force that was intertwined with tragic and significant moments in the state's corrections history.
One moment was , a "gifted tracker" who worked closely with police. Brian considered him a friend.
Mr Ward died in 2008 after suffering heat stroke in a prison van, a death the coroner described as "terrible … wholly unnecessary and avoidable".
Another came six years later, when 22-year-old Yamatji Nanda and Bunjima woman Ms Dhu died slowly while police officers and health authorities dismissed her pleas for help.
Brian says, in the aftermath, police worked to bring in "checks and balances to make sure that prisoners [were] properly cared for and monitored".
"I guess I'm one of the few officers, an Aboriginal police officer, who has probably seen this from beginning to end," he says.
The coronial inquest into Ms Dhu's death in 2016 was a watershed moment in the state's history.
She spent her last moments paralysed, being dragged from her cell along the ground, and put in the back of a police wagon where she was told to be quiet as she died from pneumonia and septicaemia.
The officers thought Ms Dhu was exaggerating or feigning her symptoms.
"It was profoundly disturbing to witness CCTV evidence of Ms Dhu being treated, by some of the police officers, as if she were an object, as if she were invisible, and without regard for her dignity as a fellow human being," the coroner said.
The inquest findings outlined the "unprofessional and inhumane treatment" of Ms Dhu by WA police officers, and made it abundantly clear there was no place for this kind of death in contemporary Australia.
The coroner summarised that Ms Dhu's death would "serve as a constant reminder of the dangers of failing to acknowledge the inherent right of every person in detention to be afforded humane and dignified treatment".
WA Police sanctioned four officers involved in Ms Dhu's case for failing in their duties, and a doctor was found guilty of professional misconduct.
The WA government, WA Police and WA Country Health Service have issued formal apologies to Ms Dhu’s family.
New state laws were passed in 2019 and 2020 to enact some of the coroner's recommendations, including making imprisonment a last resort for outstanding fines, and requiring police to notify the Aboriginal Legal Service when an Aboriginal person is taken into custody.
In a statement, WA Police said an independent Cultural Security Audit was completed in 2018 off the back of the inquest, which led to the redevelopment of its recruit training.
Designated lock-up keepers, trained to supervise and manage prisoners, have also been implemented across the state.
The WA Department of Justice says it has implemented the coroner's four recommendations relating to it.
In the almost nine years since the coroner handed down those findings, at least 44 First Nations people have died in custody in Western Australia.
There is no data to definitively determine which of those deaths could have been prevented, but the coronial inquests reveal repeated failings in the care of Aboriginal people in custody.
Noongar Yamatji mother Ms Wynne, 26, stopped breathing when she was pinned to the ground by police, and never regained consciousness.
She died in hospital in April 2019, 20 years after her own father's death in police custody at the same age.
Jomen Blanket, 30, died by suicide at Acacia prison in June 2019, after repeated warnings he was going to hang himself.
He used the same method he had demonstrated to prison officers a month earlier.
Yamatji woman JC, 29, was shot and killed by a police officer in September 2019. She was apprehended for carrying a knife down a residential Geraldton street — a week after she had been admitted to a psychiatric facility.
The coroner ruled JC's death was "preventable". The officer who shot her was acquitted of a murder charge, and her cause of death was listed as "lawful homicide".
Noongar man Ricky-Lee Cound, 22, died at Hakea prison in March 2022, more than three hours after he requested a safe cell so he didn't "hurt himself".
His pleas were ignored until other prisoners alerted officers he was self-harming. It was another 17 minutes before prison officers entered his cell, where he was found unresponsive.
Sixteen-year-old Cleveland Dodd died by suicide at Casuarina prison's youth detention unit in October 2023, about 15 minutes after he told officers "I'm gonna hang myself". His inquest is ongoing.
There has never been a criminal conviction for any Aboriginal death in custody.
The royal commission's 1991 report found Western Australia had the worst record for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody in the country.
More than three decades later, data compiled by the Australian Institute of Criminology for the ABC reveals little has changed.
The combined data from the past 10 years shows WA has the highest rates of Indigenous deaths in custody, per capita, of any Australian state or territory.
[EMBED CHART]Robert Tickner, the former Labor minister who tabled the royal commission report, told SBS earlier this year the situation was at the "lowest point we've been".
Brian Wilkinson believes an absence of accountability is behind the lack of progress.
"I no longer see that racism in an overt way, but I can assure you that I can sense the racism in a more covert way," he says.
"It's the little things that people do, not to implement policy, to not act.
"We need to be aware that there are very good policy practices and procedures. But they're only as good as the people implementing them."
The WA Department of Justice could not comment on Linton's case specifically because it is subject to a coronial inquest, but in a statement it told the ABC it "considers the safety and wellbeing of all individuals in its care a top priority".
A spokesperson for Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia said the state government had a variety measures in place to improve infrastructure through short-term controls and long-term planning.
"Every death in custody is concerning, and each incident is investigated thoroughly by the appropriate authorities," they said.
"We are currently experiencing significant pressure on custodial infrastructure, and we thank the hard-working prison officers for their efforts."
The spokesperson noted the Department of Justice was training prison officers at a "record rate", adding that $4.7 million had been allocated towards long-term custodial infrastructure planning.
The hallmarks of institutional racism
Human rights expert and Noongar woman Hannah McGlade says ongoing, preventable deaths in custody are evidence of "systemic racism".
"The police force clearly has individuals — and I don't think they're isolated cases — who are very racist, and indifferent to Aboriginal people and Aboriginal lives," she says.
"I feel like crying for all the Aboriginal people who have suffered this utter, utter violence and abuse because their skin is black or brown.
"I feel like crying for Linton."
Dr McGlade says the police officer's voice note about Linton's death is yet another example of authorities dismissing pleas for help from an Aboriginal person.
"That tells me there is really a potential situation in that workplace, and in that culture, where a person can joke about an Aboriginal man dying in custody, a person that she had an interaction with just the day before he died," she says.
Dr McGlade says the myriad of deaths in custody and coronial inquests since the royal commission lay bare the underlying issues causing Aboriginal people to be over-represented in prisons.
"We're not investing in addressing those issues and it goes back to colonisation, and the failure to actually have a treaty agreement," she says.
"We've never been really respected for our human rights, our rights to self-determination are not being upheld in this state."
Peter Collins is the legal services director at the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA (ALSWA), and says it's clear "the dial has hardly turned" on rates of Indigenous incarceration and deaths in custody since the royal commission.
"Fundamentally the reason is that those who wield power in our community — government — allow it to happen because the humanity of Aboriginal people is not valued as highly as the rest of the community," he says.
"I'd call it racism."
When Linton was arrested, it was the ALSWA that was notified as part of its custody notification service, which requires WA Police to contact the service every time an Aboriginal person is detained in a police facility.
The service, which was a recommendation from the royal commission, is intended to provide health and welfare checks to reduce deaths in custody.
Mr Collins says they were advised to expect about 19,000 calls a year when the service commenced in 2019.
"At the moment the service is receiving more than 900 calls a week, which works out to about 44,000 calls a year," he says.
"It is the highest number of custody notification calls in the country, even though a place like New South Wales has significantly more Aboriginal people.
"Aboriginal people, put bluntly, are policed relentlessly in WA."
Mr Collins says the fact Linton was arrested, exhibited clear warning signs about his mental and physical health, and then took his own life in prison, is a "damning indictment on the system".
"Nothing any government official can say to me would satisfy me that there is any excuse for that occurring," he says.
WA Police did not answer questions about allegations of systemic racism in its force and over-policing of First Nations people, nor about the steps it had taken to address the over-representation of Aboriginal people in custody.
The Department of Justice said it had completed all 13 recommendations made by the Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services from its latest report on Eastern Goldfields Regional Prison.
It also noted the prison runs an Aboriginal Visitors Scheme to connect prisoners with their family and community, and provides training for prison officers specifically around cultural awareness.
Another family searching for justice
For Linton's family, his treatment is distressing, but it does not come as a shock.
"I grew up in Kalgoorlie. I spent most of my life in Kalgoorlie. I've seen and heard the Kalgoorlie police," his Aunty Jillian McIntyre says.
"To them it's just nothing. It's just another black fella death in custody."
She speaks through teary eyes, but her conviction is clear. She wants answers.
"We are still mourning. It's never going to leave us," she says.
"Why, and how, did this young boy commit suicide, hang himself in a big building, fresh facility with cameras located all around the area?"
Linton's brother Shannon says the events that led up to his brother's death have made him feel afraid.
"I'm really scared of the police, like even more now," he says.
He hopes his mother will live long enough to see the coronial inquest into Linton's death, which could take years.
"The inquest needs to hurry up because Mum will be dead … her health is not good," he says.
Lynette says she can't take any more grief.
"Now that I've only got one son left, I'm just hoping that he wants to stay strong, wants to stay strong for his mum."?
Notes on the data
Figures on Indigenous deaths in custody since Ms Dhu's inquest were provided by various sources, including Western Australia's Department of Justice and the Institute of Criminology, and collated by the ABC.
The Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Deaths In Custody Program also provided a breakdown of the combined number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in prison custody and police custody in each state, per financial year, from 2014-15 to 2023-24.
WA’s Justice Department provided detailed information on the number of Indigenous deaths in prison custody at individual prisons between December 16, 2016, and July 31, 2025.
WA Police did not respond with updated figures on First Nations deaths in their custody for 2024-25, so the total number of Indigenous deaths in police custody since the Ms Dhu inquest represents those between December 16, 2016, and June 30, 2024 (the latest AIC data available).
Credits
The ABC thanks the families of Linton Ryan, Ms Dhu, Ms Wynne, Jomen Blanket, JC, Ricky-Lee Cound and Cleveland Dodd for their permission to use the photos and names of their loved ones.
Reporting: , and
Photography: with additional imagery by Jesmine Cheong; archival material from Federal Parliament and Four Corners
Design:
Editing and production: and
