JUSTICE 4 Bradley COOLWELL

On the 12^th September 2013 MR BRADLEY COOLWELL was 39 years old when he died in custody at the Logan Hospital QLD.

Bradley was a proud Mununjali Nations Man of Beaudesert region of QLD.

As a young man, Bradley had been in and out of jail on minor property offences.

In 1991, he was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder and spent much of the next 20 years in full-time residential, involuntary mental healthcare at “The Park” Mental Health facility in Brisbane QLD.

Mr Coolwell was admitted to Logan Hospital with a chest infection by police.

Bradly was transferred to a secluded ward.

Nurses tried to take his Superman pyjamas away and dress him in “security linen” – hospital wear that cannot be torn by hand and cannot be used to form a ligature. This caused him great distress,

“The more he resisted, the greater the effort to make him comply by the security guards. There is no evidence that he tried to strike the security personnel. He struggled and resisted to the point where force was applied first in an effort to bring him down.”

Bradley Coolwell was left naked in a prone position for several minutes, with the “security linen” left for him to dress himself. At the inquest, the nurses disagreed on whether or not he was still breathing when they left the room.

The coroner found that Bradley died from a combination of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. The inquest took five years to hand down the findings.

On Nurse Broekman’s evidence, he then lay on the bed to receive the intramuscular injection of Olanzapine.

These possibilities are excited delirium and positional asphyxia. Each of these proceeds from  the  fundamental  perspective  that  restraint  causes  stresses  on  the  body  which  interfere  with  the  normal  operations  of  the  heart  and the lungs.

Ms  Coolwell’s  evidence  is  that  she  received  a  telephone  call  from  a  staff  member at Logan Hospital, in which she was told her brother Bradley Coolwell had died.

Every death in custody triggers a coronial inquest to examine the cause of death. This is a lengthy, complex legal process that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families struggle to understand.

The Coolwell Family have 5 direct Family members on the Black Deaths in Custody list.

• Barbara Yarrie
• Faye Yarrie
• Bobby Yarrie
• Bradley Coolwell
• Shaun Coolwell

 Thanks so much for your help with this much needed cause.