Clare Nowland’s family still can’t believe their 95-year-old matriarch was killed by a police officer, who remains free and is challenging his dismissal from the force.
Former senior constable Kristian James Samuel White said ‘nah, bugger it’ before he ‘got her’ with his Taser, grotesque words that will forever haunt Mrs Nowland’s daughter Gemma Murphy.
The great-grandmother was wandering the halls of the Yallambee Lodge aged-care home in the southern NSW town of Cooma before police arrived in the early hours of May 17, 2023.
The elderly woman was holding a knife while using a walking frame and had been ignoring attempts by staff to disarm her.
‘She was met with aggressive brutality … she was a helpless, defenceless, 95-year-old lady,’ Ms Murphy told the NSW Supreme Court on Friday.
‘My mum was so much more than “the grandmother who got tasered,”‘ she said, adding that her mother should be remembered as the remarkable woman she was.
‘A beacon of love and strength, and deserving of respect in her final years,’ Ms Murphy said.
After hearing his mother had been tasered, Michael Nowland wondered how someone could do that to a ‘frail 95-year-old lady,’ leaving her pale and helpless in a hospital bed.
Clare Nowland, 95, was fatally Tasered at Yallambee Lodge aged-care home in the southern NSW town of Cooma on May 17, 2023
Kristian White, pictured outside the NSW Supreme Court on Friday, where he is waiting for sentencing
‘Like me, no one in the room could answer that question,’ he said.
Mrs Nowland fell after being struck with the Taser barbs, sustaining a bleed on the brain and dying in hospital a week later.
Several of her children and grandchildren delivered emotional victim impact statements to the court as a judge prepares to sentence White following a jury’s unanimously guilty manslaughter verdict in November.
Other statements were read by support officers.
They said White’s ‘gutless,’ ‘inhumane’ and ‘incomprehensible’ actions robbed Mrs Nowland of a dignified death and her family of giving her a proper goodbye.
Many said they could never forgive his actions and none said they had.
White has been on bail since the verdict, freely mingling in the Cooma community, spending Christmas with his family and occasionally running into Mrs Nowland’s loved-ones.
Since her death, the family have also faced legal proceedings, which delayed her funeral and prevented them from speaking out amid significant media attention.
Family of Mrs Nowland (pictured outside the NSW Supreme Court on Friday) delivered victim impact statements at White’s sentencing hearing
‘It has been a whirlwind and we didn’t have any choice to be brought into it,’ grandson Scott Nowland told the court.
One of Clare Nowland’s many grandchildren, taking a work-related course on de-escalation, listened to the tasering death of his own grandmother used as an example of a poorly managed incident, the court was told.
Kym Lloyd said her grandmother’s death and her family’s grief had been drawn out by the fact she was killed by a police officer, requiring an investigation, a forensic autopsy and attracting significant attention from the media and wider community.
‘The public care and they want to know, they too are appalled,’ she said.
Repeatedly recounting White’s actions and their impacts has been emotionally draining.
‘Words cannot describe the anger I feel toward you and your actions,’ she told the officer in court.
White was removed from the NSW Police Force in December, but he has launched legal action for a review before the Industrial Relations Commission.
His sentencing hearing continues.
