Stuart’s family say he asked for help but didn’t get it. Days later he was dead

In her 25 years, there is a line that Lisa Hume will never forget.

“I’m sorry, sis, I tried. You need to come home; this is serious.”

It was a phone call made from Casuarina Prison in Western Australia on March 3, by a close family friend.

WARNING: Readers are advised this story references suicide. This story includes the image and name of a First Nations person who has died, with permission from their family. Please take care when reading.

Her friend was sharing the devastating news that Lisa’s big brother, ‘Stuey’, had tried to take his own life in his cell.

“I couldn’t understand him. He was just crying and said, ‘I tried’ because he was giving him CPR,” she told the ABC’s Indigenous Affairs team.

Just nine days earlier, Stuart had lost his dad to a terminal condition.

Hoping for a miracle while mourning the loss of their dad, Stuart’s family were forced to make a heart-wrenching decision.

“The doctor said, ‘it’s just a body lying there, his brain is not functioning at all,'” Lisa recalled.

“[Mum] just started crying, she didn’t want to listen… She was in denial, and she kept saying, ‘No, people come back.'”

Four days later, on March 7, Stuart’s life support was switched off.

He died in hospital the same night.

The series of events leading up to this moment are what his family call a failure of ‘duty of care’ by the Western Australian government.

While the Department of Justice says it cannot comment on the circumstances around Stuart’s death while a coronial inquest is pending, his family says his request for help was refused.

Stuart Hume: A ‘happy-go-lucky-child’

Stuart was a much-loved middle child who came from a big family.

He was one of 12 children.

Lisa remembers her big brother as someone who had a lot of love for his siblings and was a person who would ‘give the shirt off his back’ to help those in need.

“He’d always sneak lollies and get us red liquorices, and we’d get in trouble, but he’d always give us some,” she said with a laugh.

“He was just a happy-go-lucky child.”

Stuart was talented in sports, winning “Best and Fairest” trophies and dreamed of becoming a professional motorbike rider.

Growing up, Stuart’s home life was unstable, and he spent periods of time separated from his family. At age 14 he ended up in juvenile detention.

He was in and out of prison for much of his adult life. 

When he died, he had been on remand for 8 months at Casuarina Prison for a string of serious charges, including aggravated home burglary and drug possession, with his matters due in court next week.

Stuart is one of many. Recent Closing the Gap data revealed that the number of Aboriginal people in prison is worsening, as are Indigenous suicide rates.

‘He asked for help’

The last time Stuart saw his dad, Lindsay, he was given permission to visit him in palliative care, where they said their final goodbyes. Afterwards, Stuart returned to prison.

The next day, his dad died.

When Stuart heard the news, he struggled in silence, but in their regular phone calls his family soon noticed something was wrong.

“He started to get a little bit disconnected, [he] stopped showing emotions,” Lisa reflected.

She said other prisoners told them they heard Stuart asking for mental health support but that he didn’t receive it.

Stuart’s first request, the family was told, was for permission to see his cousin, who was in another unit at Casuarina prison, to help him process the news. It was allegedly denied.

Stuart then asked the prison’s mental health unit for help, but his sister said, he was told ‘to come back in the morning’.

“He said he wasn’t mentally feeling okay, and all the boys in the unit said that they heard him,” Lisa told the ABC.

Later on the morning of March 3, the WA Department of Justice contacted the family with the news that Stuart had been found unresponsive in his cell and had been transported to hospital.

“It was a big shock to the family and to all the boys in the prison,” Lisa said.

“I just feel like because [of] the lack of duty of care… they never checked if he was okay.”

The ABC’s Indigenous Affairs team contacted the WA Department of Justice to ask if Stuart was put on a ‘welfare’ or ‘wellbeing watch’ after the death of his father. The department said it could not respond due to the pending coronial inquest.

When Stuart’s distraught family members arrived at Fiona Stanley Hospital later that day to see him in ICU, they told the ABC they were refused entry because they didn’t have ID or a statutory declaration.

It meant some family members had to undertake a two-hour round trip to get a form signed before they could see him.

“They had two police officers outside his door, and we weren’t allowed to see him unless we had a stat dec.

“I just thought, ‘He isn’t going to run anywhere’.

“That was frustrating and upsetting because we didn’t know if he was going to survive,” Lisa said.

WA Health did not respond to our questions before deadline.

Prisons called out by coroners

The question of how so many Indigenous people continue to lose their lives to suicide while in prison has highlighted long-running issues with safety in jail cells. These are issues that coroner’s reports and experts have blasted for three decades.

The recommendation to minimise hanging points in prison cells was first made back in 1991 in the report from the landmark Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. But it’s never been fully implemented.

For the past 20 years, that recommendation has been repeated with increasing urgency. Coroners Philip Urquhart and Michael Jenkin are among those who have criticised the WA government’s failure to fully implement these “relatively minor modifications” that could mean the difference between life and death for vulnerable prisoners.

“The unacceptable provision of prison cells with a high number of ligature points remains an acute crisis,” Coroner Urquhart stated in the 2023 inquest findings into the death of an Aboriginal man.

“The court will undoubtedly continue to encounter deaths in prison from hangings in cells that use these ligature points. All too frequently, these deaths involve First Nations young men.”

Last year in November while handing down findings from a coronial inquest into another Aboriginal suicide at Casuarina Prison, Coroner Michael Jenkin recommended “as a matter of the utmost urgency, the Department take immediate steps to ensure that all cells at Casuarina are three-point ligature minimised as quickly as possible, with a view to ensuring all cells at Casuarina are fully ligature minimised over time.”

Casuarina is not the only WA prison to have been singled out by a coroner for issues with ligature points. Hakea, another maximum-security prison just down the road, has also been criticised.

Earlier in 2022, Coroner Jenkin appealed to the government to take urgent action to address the “appalling situation”, saying that only “3.9 per cent of Hakea Prison cells had been fully-ligature minimised, and a staggering 39.1 per cent of cells are not ligature minimised at all.”

The WA Department of Justice said in a statement to the ABC that it “has been undertaking a comprehensive program of ligature minimisation in the state’s prisons since 2005, noting that it is not possible to achieve the complete elimination of all ligature points.”

It also stated that: “The program to increase the number of fully ligature-minimised cells across the custodial estate is ongoing, with priority given to facilities with the highest risk and need.”

While acknowledging WA prisons have done some work to modify cells, Gary Mack — President of the Law Society of WA — said prisons still have “inadequate and outdated infrastructure” and progress on removing hanging points is “really slow”.

Mr Mack believes the government has the capability to refit the remaining cells but must commit to financing it.

In a 2021 letter to Coroner Ros Fogliani, the Department of Justice said immediately moving to convert all cells at Hakea Prison to either fully ligature minimised or three-point ligature minimised is “cost prohibitive” and that a refit could cost between $35,000 — $50,000 per cell.

“Funding for prisons and improving the infrastructure means dealing with a cohort of people that don’t get a lot of sympathy from the general community,” Mr Mack said.

Prisoners’ rights to access health care are enshrined in law.

Bardi woman Professor Pat Dudgeon has studied coronial responses to Aboriginal suicides for decades. It’s her view that the failures stretch beyond unsafe cells.

“The most important factor in this is the lack of support,” she said.

“That he wasn’t able to be given culturally appropriate support, nor simple requests like wanting to see his cousin, that might have been all that he needed to decide to continue on.”

Aboriginal people are very family oriented, explained Professor Dudgeon, adding that during times of crisis connection to family members, community, culture and country can be protective factors.

“A request to see a cousin? I mean it’s not rocket science or some secret,” Professor Dudgeon said.

“He was reaching out for help and to the most appropriate person… That’s what makes me sad.”

Family remember Stuart as they say goodbye

Lisa believes if Stuart had more support during his life, it could have helped to break the cycle of incarceration.

“[Stuart] was couch surfing and then he ended back in jail within a week and a half,” Lisa said.

“If they do get out of jail, help them with accommodation, help them get on their feet by finding employment.

“He had none of that and that just kind of upset him,” she reflected.

The family is raising money to bury their dad and brother together in a few weeks’ time. Lisa remembers Stuart’s deep love for his family and his unending smile, despite how much he was struggling.

“He just kept trying to keep a happy voice, I guess,” she said.