28-05-2025
NT major crimes unit investigates 24-year-old Yuendumu man's death in custody
A 24-year-old Aboriginal man who died after being restrained by police in Alice Springs was from the remote community of Yuendumu.
Northern Territory police said the man stopped breathing shortly after two officers restrained him at a Coles supermarket about 1:10pm on Tuesday following an altercation.
Assistant Commissioner Travis Wurst said the man was placing items down the front of his clothing when he was confronted by security guards.
"One of the security guards was assaulted and there were two police officers, who were in plain clothes at the time," Assistant Commissioner Wurst told reporters on Tuesday.
"The male behaved rather aggressively and was placed onto the ground by those police officers.
"He was later identified as losing consciousness."
Assistant Commissioner Wurst said St John Ambulance paramedics arrived and took the man to Alice Springs Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 2:20pm.
Detectives from the NT Police Force's Major Crime Section have travelled to Alice Springs to investigate.
A report will be prepared for the coroner.
Police are treating the incident as a death in custody, where a person has died while being detained by law enforcement, or while they were in the custody of a correctional facility.
They include deaths in prisons or police stations, during police transfers and in operations like police pursuits.
The most recent high-profile death in custody is the 2019 police shooting of 19-year-old Warlpiri-Luritja man Kumanjayi Walker during a bungled arrest in Yuendumu, about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs.
The former NT police officer who fired the fatal shot, Zachary Rolfe, was found not guilty on all charges in 2022.
The long-awaited coroner's findings into Mr Walker's death is due to be handed down on June 10 in Yuendumu.
Twenty people have died in custody so far this year in Australia, eight of them First Nations people, according to data from the National Deaths in Custody Program.
Data shows 593 Indigenous people have died in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
