The family of Aboriginal man Wayne Morrison, who died in a South Australian prison in September, is demanding that the CCTV footage of his last moments be released ahead of his funeral this weekend.
Morrison's sister Latoya Rule, 24, will never forget the four days her family endured at the end of September.
On Friday 23 September at around 11:30am, Rule and her mother were sitting in a South Australian courtroom waiting for her brother, 29, to appear via video link from Yatala Labour Prison.
Morrison was on remand and about to make an application for home detention. The family had been told it would likely be successful and they were ready to pick him up later that day. Then "someone ran into the court with a note".
"They handed it to the judge and straight away we knew something was wrong because the judge said that Wayne wasn’t able to appear in court today and for us to go away and talk to Yatala prison," Rule told BuzzFeed News. "From that moment we were kept out of everything."
Rule made several frantic calls to the prison before calling every hospital in Adelaide to ask if her older brother was a patient.
Prison staff refused to give her information and the hospitals denied having Morrison as a patient.
Rule told BuzzFeed News that an Aboriginal liaison officer at Yatala prison told her she "needed to stop calling" and asked for the names of relatives in the prison "so they could be separated".
What Rule and her family didn't know was that Morrison was fighting for his life in the Royal Adelaide Hospital after an altercation with five prison guards while waiting for his court appearance.
It was a family friend who worked in the health sector who told the family that Morrison was at the hospital. But when the family arrived at the hospital they were told by staff he wasn't there.
"I then overheard two nurses say, 'good luck trying to find Wayne because we’ve changed his name. Poor family, they won’t be able to find him.' I called them out on it and then security took us outside and told us we weren’t allowed to see him," Rule said.
It wasn't until the head of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, the peak Indigenous legal body in South Australia, arrived that they were allowed to visit Morrison.
"We had to go up with a security guard," Rule said. "We had to be scanned. We weren’t allowed to have any bags or cameras or phones... nothing with us. So it was literally like visiting a prison. Only two family members were allowed in at a time."
Twelve hours after waiting in court to see her brother, Rule was visiting him in an intensive care unit.
"I asked [doctors] about the bruising on his body, the bruising on his chest, the bruising around his body," Rule said. "I asked how could he have a heart attack but have all these injuries to his body. Half of his face was completely fucked-up, messed-up.
"He had damage to literally all of his organs. He had so much damage."
Morrison's life support was turned off three days later.
"We can’t even have an open casket because of the way he looks, we are going to cremate him," Rule said.
Morrison will be cremated this Saturday in Adelaide.
Ahead of the service, Rule is pushing for answers about what happened in the lead-up to Morrison's death and wants to know why authorities failed to inform the family during that period.
"We want the CCTV footage released," Rule said. "Why would someone go off when they were potentially getting off that day? Why would you stuff that up?
"He had never been in trouble with the law and he had never been to prison before."
In September, David Brown, the Correctional Services Department chief executive, said there had been a "critical incident" at Yatala after Morrison assaulted five prison staff.
“In the course of the incident, a medical emergency ensued and the correctional staff applied immediate first aid to the prisoner and sought assistance from on-site medical staff," Brown said.
Morrison suffered a heart attack and was taken to hospital.
The incident is currently under police investigation. Police will hand their findings on to the coroner for an inquest.
"The taskforce established to investigate the death of Wayne Morrison is continuing to work hard to establish all the facts surrounding this case, and this is a lengthy and detailed investigation that will take some time to complete," Des Bray from the major crime investigation branch told BuzzFeed News.
SA police failed to answer BuzzFeed News' questions on whether there was CCTV of the incident and if they would comply with the family's request to release it.
The SA Department of Correctional Services declined to comment while a police investigation is underway.
In 1991 the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody handed down its final report detailing widespread institutionalised racism within the prison and police systems. That racism directly contributed to the majority of Aboriginal deaths in custody, the commission found.
In the twenty-five years since then, there have been more than 365 Aboriginal deaths in custody around the country.