Wieambilla: Police commissioner walked through horrific crime scene where two young cops shot dead
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A heartbroken police commissioner has revealed why she toured the grisly crime scene where two young police officers were shot dead, as Australia mourns the lives lost in one of the worst tragedies in Queensland police history.
Katarina Carroll said she “had to” walk across the rural property in Wieambilla, three hours west of Brisbane, after police officers Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, were executed by its residents around 4:30 p.m. Monday.
Nathaniel Train, his brother Gareth and sister-in-law Stacey opened fire on four police officers who had been visiting the house for a “routine” check after receiving a missing person report.
Two of the officers were shot to death execution-style, while a third officer, Randall Kirk, 28, was hit in the leg but managed to escape, while the fourth, Keely Brough, also 28, managed to flee. to the bushes and evade the assassins.
“I had to do that, I had to see what happened, where it happened, and try to get a sense of why it happened,” Commissioner Carroll said. The project as she fought back tears on Tuesday.
What is clear, what is very clear, is that they had no chance. I can’t believe two officers made it out of there and bravely did what they had to do to survive.
“Unfortunately, we lost two officers and, as I said, going to the scene of the crime and seeing what they were dealing with, in my opinion, was not survivable.”
Katarina Carroll (pictured) said she “had to” walk across the rural property in Wieambilla, three hours west of Brisbane, after police officers Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, were executed by its inhabitants around 4:30 pm Monday
Commissioner Carroll said the four officers had been making a “routine” visit to the house after Queensland police were asked by NSW police to do a missing persons check on Nathaniel, who police believes he had been missing for a year.
“What they found was incredibly, incredibly difficult to understand,” he said.
“At the end of the day myself, the community and the officers of the Queensland Police Service want to understand why this happened.”
Police will “definitely” investigate Gareth’s involvement in the online conspiracy community, he said, after it was revealed that he regularly shared bizarre and deranged theories about world events.
In an online tirade, he wrote that the Australian government was responsible for the Port Arthur Massacre, where 35 people were killed in Tasmania in 1996.
“Anyone who watched the live media coverage at the time and was aware of the political hoax that took place knows that this was a government psy-op to disarm the Australian population,” Train wrote in November 2020.
He also regularly shared his distrust of the Queensland Special Emergency Response Team (SERT), the same team that came to his house and shot him at around 10:30pm local time on Monday night.
Four officers had attended a property on Wains Road, in Wieambilla, west of Brisbane, around 4:30pm on Monday, after being asked by their colleagues in New South Wales to check on missing man Nathaniel Train. Two officers were shot and killed
Constables Rachel McCrow, 29 (left) and Matthew Arnold, 26, (right) were shot dead as they entered Gareth Train’s property in Wieambilla, rural Queensland.
Four officers were at this Wains Road property in Wieambilla when they were shot
“The state-sponsored terrorist squads: SOG, SERT and other special people are nothing more than government paramilitary hammers,” Train said in September last year.
Commissioner Carroll spoke with the families of the four officers involved in the tragedy, describing the conversations as “incredibly difficult.”
They are not doing it right. We all cry, we are all upset. In a way, I think we’re angry because it’s hard to understand when a call is made when you’re protecting the community, it’s very hard to understand, to make sense of what happened,” he said.
We’ll get to the bottom of this. It feels numb, it feels meaningless. It is one of the most tragic days in police history.
Police are expected to interview friends and family in the coming days as a full-scale investigation into the incident begins.
Neighbor Alan Dare (pictured) was shot dead by the two men after he went to investigate the shooting.
One of the two surviving officers, Constable Keeley Brough (pictured) fled into the surrounding bushland, where she texted relatives believing she was going to die and urgently pleaded for help.
On Tuesday, the brothers’ father, Ronald Train, a 27-year-old retired pastor, said: “I have lost two children.”
I’m not going to share anything with you, you can speculate and make up all you want,’ Mr Train told The Chinchilla News outside his Toowoomba home.
I’ve already had conversations with the police.
Nathaniel Train had been a highly respected educator who was a leader in his field, with a track record of turning schools around and improving NAPLAN results, until a heart attack and a string of cheating derailed his life.
Train had previously been principal of Innisfail East and Yorkeys Knob state schools in far north Queensland, where he won plaudits for his impact and results.
The 46-year-old then joined Walgett Community College Primary School in NSW as chief executive in 2020.
The property, owned by Gareth, who talked about preparing his home for an apocalypse, and his wife Stacey was well off the grid, had extensive solar panels and water tanks.
But within months, he was embroiled in a dispute over a cheating incident during a NAPLAN exam at school.
One student, who shared the last name of a teaching assistant, was said to be unable to answer the first two questions, but then correctly answered the next 34.
Nathaniel stopped working at the school in August after suffering a massive heart attack at school and had to be revived by his teachers.
The former teacher quit his job and disappeared in August 2021, leaving his wife behind, and had not been seen for months before Monday’s savage ambush.
The cold-blooded shooting has shocked the Western Downs community as locals leave flowers and tributes at their local police stations.