Prison whistleblower reveals how bikie boss Brent Reker ended up dead in his cell

A prison whistleblower has shed light on the last desperate days of a notorious Finks biker boss Brent ‘BJ’ Reker before he was found dead in prison.

The 35-year-old national president was found hanged at Ravenhall Correctional Center in December 2019 after barricading himself in his cell.

Although his suicide is the subject of a Victorian inquest, a former prison guard told Daily Mail Australia that prison staff had ‘blood on their hands’ over his death.

The guard, who wished to remain anonymous, had worked closely with Reker before hanging himself after being transferred to a troublesome prisoner unit.

“He was a huge, huge suicide risk. He attempted suicide several times while in Melbourne Assessment Prison, a maximum security prison run specifically for people with mental health problems,” she said.

Reker had become suicidal after the Director of Public Prosecutions won an appeal to the Supreme Court that had his bail revoked in February 2019.

The motorcyclist was initially released on bail for alleged bashing, described as a revenge attack for releasing nude photos of his girlfriend Tara Egglestone online.

Reker’s one-year-old son Saint was scheduled to undergo surgery just days after Judge Christopher Beale revoked his bail.

“He did very well on the outside. He started to deal with his mental health issues, tried to get out of the club and got legitimate work,” the whistleblower said.

‘He had done nothing wrong. The OPP were just Gung ho that he shouldn’t have gotten bail in the first place.”

On his return to prison, the former guard claimed Reker was “furious” at his incarceration.

“He made it very, very clear that any chance he got when he was alone, he would kill himself,” she said.

Last month, the coroner’s court heard that on the first attempt, Reker attempted to hang himself with a torn shirt before prison guards took him down.

The next day he attempted suicide again, this time with a smock.

Eight days later, he threatened to commit suicide again.

“Staff discovered that Mr Reker had exposed the wire of an electric jug in his cell and threatened to electrocute himself by placing the jug in the cell toilet and touching the water,” Senior Constable Nation said.

At the time of his death, Reker was in talks with the Finks to leave the club, find legitimate employment, and had even begun to have his tattoos removed.

The former staffer claimed that Reker would use his formidable size to barricade his cell.

It was a tactic he used to prevent guards from catching him on the day he finally killed himself.

“It wasn’t a new strategy he just came up with. They were well aware that he did those things in a way that would make it very difficult for the officers to enter his cell if they had to go in there,” she said.

The former staffer claimed that Reker should never have been moved from MAP to the medium-security Ravenhall Correctional Center.

At that point, Reker’s life was at stake by his steps to leave the outlaw club.

“Ravenhall is great in theory, but a lot of the staff is very young, very inexperienced and it’s not managed very well compared to what it could be,” the whistleblower said.

In the days before his suicide, Reker complained that he was bored and warned prison staff that he would injure himself due to a canceled dental appointment.

“Do we have to economize to get what we want?” he said to a guard.

Reker later told a prison doctor that he and other inmates all planned to “cut in” if their demands were not met.

The court heard that Reker was desperate to get a job in prison and threatened violence if he didn’t get his way.

The prison bosses were fed up and agreed to move Reker to a unit away from other inmates.

The proposed move saw Reker swallow shards of metal when guards came to collect him.

Upon moving to the Forbes unit, Reker told staff he had no intention of harming himself.

He was placed under hourly observation, which quickly showed that there were problems.

The court heard that Reker had covered his cell with toilet paper and blocked his cell door with a mattress.

When guards ran to a rear window to see what was happening inside, they saw a chair wedged into Reker’s shower.

The court heard guards then forced their way into Reker’s cell, where they found him lying on the floor with a ligature around his neck.

He could not be brought back to life.

The prison whistleblower said that given his fragile state of mind, Reker should never have been transferred to the unit.

“He should have been in a unit that is guarded 24/7 with no hang points, no anything that can help him facilitate a suicide and there are those units, they exist and they have prisoners in those units all the time in nothing else then a dress so they can’t use their clothes to hang themselves,” she said.

“There are padded cells, no suspension points, no electrical points – none of that. He definitely should have been in one of those… he was a ticking time bomb. 100 percent.’

The former staffer claimed that most prison guards don’t care about inmate safety.

“They see prisoners as scum and the world would be better off without them, so they don’t have a problem with someone committing suicide let alone someone like Brent,” she said.

Reker’s history of mental anguish was well known to prison staff, the source said.

“The amount of trauma that man had gone through was ridiculous — the things he had been through and seen as a kid were horrible, so when you put someone who’s had those experiences in a confined space, all those things come back up,” he said she. .

“They are exacerbated and, moreover, it is quite an expected reaction from people not to deal with them properly. Add to that his personality, his reputation – he wouldn’t be the type of person to lie down on a couch and talk to someone about his feelings.’

In a 2018 interview, Reker told Daily Mail Australia: ‘Bikie clubs are the last stand for human rights – in Australia no one is allowed to do anything anymore.

“We – like everyone else – just want to hang out with our friends and go out for drinks on a Friday night without being told we can’t.”

Reker admitted that “the way he looks” often caught the attention of the police.

Reker was due to appear in County Court on 29 June 2020 for a final hearing on his case.

The corona case will go to court next month.

A spokesperson for GEO Group Australia, which operates Ravenhall, said it was limited in what could be said while the matter was the subject of a coronial inquiry.

“GEO extends its condolences to Mr. Reker’s family,” she said.

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