NSW Police Chased TJ Hickey to His Death 21 Years Ago and the Silence Remains

Demonstrators gathered on Gadigal land at Waterloo’s TJ Hickey Park last Friday to mark 21 years since NSW police constable Michael Hollingsworth chased 17-year-old Gomeroi boy TJ Hickey, who was riding his bike down the street, to his death on 14th of February 2004.

The ever-resilient Aunty Gail Hickey, TJ’s mother, the Hickey family and supporters continue to march each year and campaign for greater transparency around the boy’s death, as Hollingsworth and his partner constable Maree Reynolds actually mounted a curb during the pursuit to chase TJ down a pedestrian laneway, just prior to his taking a corner at speed and becoming impaled on a fence.

The police began chasing TJ, who’d committed no crime, as, evidently, they were searching for an individual who’d robbed another at Redfern train station, although there was no evidence linking the teen to the crime. And his death shocked the city and so outraged the local Aboriginal community that the Redfern Riots broke out, which saw 40 police officers injured and 25 arrests made.

The injustices surrounding the TJ Hickey death in custody only increased in the wake of the incident, as then NSW state coroner John Abernethy found at the August 2024 inquest that despite Hollingsworth following him down a pedestrian walkway, and another police vehicle giving chase by road, the police vans were not in pursuit of TJ, so they hadn’t breached any police protocols.

When a pursuit is not a pursuit

“Aunty Gail has been fighting this fight for 21 years with no justice,” said Wiradjuri man Uncle Dave Bell, as he stood beside Aunty Gail Hickey in TJ Hickey Park amongst the residential housing towers in Waterloo Green. “The problem was with the coroner’s report and with police investigating police.”

There were a number of discrepancies regarding the findings of the inquest. This included how the coroner had come to the decision that the two NSW police vans were not in pursuit of TJ but rather were only following him, and from there, Abernathy was able to label the incident a “freak accident”.

Police van Redfern 16 was following TJ on his bike down Redfern’s Renwick Street, which ends in a cul-de-sac, and after the boy mounted the curb to enter a pedestrian laneway that linked to Phillip Street and he came out the other side, another van Redfern 17 was already coming down that street, so the teen turned into a residential block driveway, which is where the fatal incident occurred.

Other suspicious circumstances that continue to raise concerns two decades later, include police having pulled TJ off the fence prior to the ambulance arriving, which is not the way that officers are trained to respond to such emergencies, while both Hollingsworth and Reynolds neglected to mention that their van mounted the curb to follow the boy down the lane in their incident reports.

“The family is looking for closure 21 years on. Aunty Gail has gone through horrific trauma. We know what went on that day,” Uncle Dave continued. “TJ’s spirit lives on, and we love him dearly.”

“As though the police are not responsible”

“In 2020, Scott Marsh painted a mural in Redfern of a burning police car. It had TJ Hickey’s name on it. The police and council painted over it within two days. They whitewashed it,” said Professor Thalia Anthony. “And that is the history of how the life and death of TJ Hickey has been treated, as though the police are not responsible – as though we are the problem in calling for justice.”

“They wouldn’t even let us put up a plaque. UTS students organised a plaque to commemorate TJ and to recognise that he was chased to death,” the UTS law professor continued before the 100-odd family members and supporters gathered on Gadigal Country at Waterloo Green on Friday 14 February.

“This is a legal system that is completely broken. It is a legal system that needs radical change, and here today, this is the change. We keep turning up 21 years later and letting them know that we are not going away until there is justice.”

The Hickey family and the Indigenous Social Justice Association (ISLA) presented then NSW attorney general Mark Speakman with a petition in 2020, which had been signed by over 20,000 constituents and called for a parliamentary inquiry into the death, with a view to reopening the coronial process, as the document claimed the police investigation was inadequate and the inquest incomplete.

The current NSW Liberal opposition leader, however, went on to refuse the request.

Indeed, as he ended his coronial findings into TJ’s death, then coroner Abernathy even chided the Redfern community, stating that due to the outcome of the inquest, they could then stop spreading “rampant gossip and innuendo” about NSW police being responsible for the death of the teenager.

“Justice doesn’t look like the legal system,” Anthony continued. “It looks like working from the ground and recreating a system in which there is true self-determination and empowerment, in which Aboriginal kids can be riding their bike and not feel like the police are throwing at them a death threat, because that is how TJ felt.”

The war continues

TJ Hickey’s death is amongst 586 First Nations deaths in custody since the time of the handing down of the Royal Commission report into Aboriginal custodial deaths whilst being held by Australian police or corrections officers. And the official inquiry laid out 339 recommendations, most of which have been ignored.

So, rather than marking the beginning of the end of the issue, the handing down of the official inquiry report into Aboriginal deaths in custody signalled an escalation in the problem.

No police or corrections officer has ever been convicted in relation to any of these custody deaths, while three recent murder trials involving a prison guard who shot a Wiradjuri man in the back in NSW, and a police officer who shot and killed a Warlpiri teenage boy in the Northern Territory and another who shot a Yamatji woman in Western Australia, all resulted in acquittals.

“There wouldn’t be a Blackfella’s family in this country that hasn’t suffered directly under the injustices of what goes on. We are still at war,” said Uncle Wayne “Coco” Wharton. “Don’t believe the bullshit they tell you about sorry and the other, because it’s not. What you see played out here, was no different to what’s playing out in Gaza.”

Wharton explained that Aboriginal people have to live with the invasion, overpolicing and the imposition of the state ever day of their lives.

In terms of the state, the Kooma man explained that it’s the policy of the state to attack First Nations kids, in order to break the will of their families and their wider communities. And he raised the point that the Queensland Crisafulli government has recently changed the law so under certain circumstances a 10 year old kid can now be sentenced to life imprisonment.

The last 12 months has seen every state and territory on the mainland commence a youth crime crackdown, and 63 percent of the kids in child prisons nationwide are Indigenous children, yet they only account for 5.7 percent of those aged 10 to 17 amongst the wider population.

“They try and attack our children. They think they break us by attacking our kids. When our kids defend themselves and they look for safety, they attack them more. I just came back from Western Australia, and the traffic police over there, the ones that control the trains and the bus stations, walk around like they are on steroids and pick on our kids going home,” Uncle Coco made clear.

“Their system is to break our kids,” the Kooma man said in concluding. “They designed this to keep our people in prison and in poverty. Poverty is a tool of genocide, and our young kids are the victims of this genocidal practice.”