PART 2: Kangaroo Flat siege: Smoke was rising from my chest 

BENDIGO police Sergeant Peter Lukaitis sensed October 1, 1999, was going to be different.

From the moment he signed on for duty the night was busy.

His first job was a young person threatening to blow up a school with a gas cylinder.

The next  a youth caught driving .05 who could only talk of suicide.

As he finished calming the young offender, news broke – police officers had been shot at Kangaroo Flat.

Kangaroo Flat resident John Wason had reacted badly to an ambulance being called to his home on the service road running parallel to High Street and just to the south of the Lockwood Road intersection.

He fired several shots at police – some hit their target.

Sergeant Lukaitis rushed to the scene and into an event that would change his life.

‘’At the time, obviously, there’s lots of thoughts going through your head but you’re trying to formulate a plan, stay calm, get as much information as you can to work out what your options are,’’ he recalls.

‘’That was reasonably tricky because communications had become difficult, if not non-existent.

‘’My immediate concerns were the safety of any members at the scene. How do we get the injured officers out and stay safe at the same time and formulate a plan to cordon and contain the offender?

‘’At the time I knew very little about him, other than what I was told by ambulance officers and the background in very brief terms by D24 staff.’’

Sergeant Lukaitis remembers things happening so quickly at the scene and the arrival of Inspector Ulf Kaminski and a stranger changed the course of the night.

‘’We knew we had to be careful and, in fact, take cover but a member of the public just walked through the scene to tell us that Senior Detective Craig Miller was injured and behind a tree,’’ he said.

‘’When he came through the scene we thought he might have been the offender, so I had to draw my firearm on him, but when we established he was only a member of the public, we had to get him back behind the van.

‘’Unfortunately, the ambulances that were initially our cover had reversed back and that’s when Ulf had asked me to come over and give him a briefing – when I look back on it now, we were therefore exposed, which was unfortunate.’’

As they discussed their options - 90 to 100 metres from the house - Kaminski suddenly slumped to the ground.

‘’He basically reacted to the gunshot milli-seconds before we heard the gunshot,’’ Sergeant Lukaitis said.

‘’He hit the ground right beside me.

‘’That shot could have been me or him… it was him.’’

Inspector Kaminski had been shot in the stomach and Sergeant Lukaitis was amazed how things became so crystal clear, so quickly in such a situation.

‘’I don’t know if that’s training or adrenalin and your senses coming into play but it immediately became clear what had happened and I immediately hit the deck with Ulf… I could hear the gunshots still coming.

‘’My immediate reaction was that I had to get Ulf and myself under cover which at that stage was his car on the nature strip.

‘’I knew he’d been hit in the stomach because he hit the ground quickly and he seemed to deteriorate quickly. I kept asking if he could get to the car and he was telling me he couldn’t. While I was trying to get Ulf toward the car – trying to push him toward the car – the other shot came through and got me in the foot.’’

Looking back Sergeant Lukaitis estimates the bullet missed his head by millimetres.

Shot. Injured. Scared. Sergeant Lukaitis’ thoughts remained focused on one thing – getting Ulf Kaminski to safety.

‘’I said to him: ‘We have to go, we can’t stay here because we are going to get shot again’,’’ he said.

‘’I ran from there to behind a brick wall. I looked up and saw he was still where I left him. I said: ‘Why aren’t you coming over?’ He said: ‘I can’t move, I can’t do it’.’’

An ambulance paramedic volunteered to go to Kaminski but Sergeant Lukaitis made a calculated decision – his experience told him the gun was a .22 and backed his protective vest to withstand such a bullet.

He moved back into the line of fire and put himself between Kaminski and the gun.

‘’Ulf was still saying he couldn’t move. I said you have to and when I say one, two, three you have to go – I’ll stand in front of you. Then he did it and we went behind a tree, which looks pretty small when you are getting shot at.

‘’I was pretty scared myself at that stage because I could still hear the firing and we were still exposed. I just knew we had to get out – we couldn’t stay where we were. ‘’

Sergeant Lukaitis believes an element of guilt drove him to face the danger and help Kaminski.

‘’I did sort of feel guilty at the time about Ulf getting shot and the last thing I wanted to do was see him shot again – I don’t think I could have handled that.

‘’When those ambulances reversed I felt I should have realised we were exposed and when he got shot it become crystal clear what had gone on and I should have realised that we were exposed. I just didn’t want to see him hurt again.’’

Kaminski’s deteriorating condition and that small tree prompted Sergeant Lukaitis to move them to a concrete bus shelter and waiting ambulance officers.

With Kaminski in good hands and the adrenalin rushing through his body countering the pain from the gunshot wound, Sergeant Lukaitis turned his focus to John Wason.

‘’We didn’t know where John Wason was and I was concerned he might be coming around to the rear where the members were, so I was guarding there and trying to get some information back to the senior sergeant on the scene Trevor Marshall who was at a command post at the old Kangaroo Flat police station,’’ he said

Around 45 minutes later, Sergeant Peter Cashen and Senior Constable Len Igoe arrived to escort him from the scene.

The body of John Wason was found in the house the next day – the Kangaroo Flat siege was over.

Four police officers – Sergeant Lukaitis, Ulf Kaminski, Craig Miller and Peter Eames – were taken to Bendigo Hospital for treatment.

All survived.

‘’Just yesterday I was cleaning up documents at home and found a photo of Ulf who has since died and every now and then I think of him and how things might have been different if he’d still been around,’’ he said.

‘’After that night we had a pretty strong bond. It was what happened on the night but what happened afterwards. We got to know one another more and when you’re in a situation like that you develop bonds.

Sergeant Lukaitis believes all involved in that night share that bond.

‘’Superintendent Dave Mansell was at a restaurant having dinner with his wife and he attended the scene just after the initial shooting. He was able to use his phone for communications and direction, because no one could get to the cars and had lost their mobile radios during the initial shooting. He also did a lot of behind the scenes afterwards that ensured we were given the best chance at recovering from what happened,’’ he said.

Sergeant Lukaitis still recalls the enormous support from the Bendigo community in the days and weeks after the siege, and has no doubt that played a major role in his recovery.

‘’It was great to have a lot of people come to see me. I had a lot of support from friends, colleagues and the police welfare and psych unit. I talked to a lot of people and felt that did the trick for me,’’ he said.

‘’A lot of school kids sent letters from class with drawings that I’ve still got. That helped. Just to know that people are thinking of you.’’

Sergeant Lukaitis barely gives the incident a thought when he drives by that spot these days and prefers to look back at the positives of that time in his life.

‘’The general support – the letters that people sent to me – was really helpful. In fact, I think I only had a month off work then went to D24 to work because my foot was still in plaster.’’

Another significant part of the healing process for Sergeant Lukaitis arrived in the form of a Police Valour Award and National Bravery Medal recognising his actions that night.

‘It was really good to take your family to those award ceremonies and be recognised and I just felt that was part of the positive side of the whole affair,’’ he said.

‘’I wouldn’t want to do those things to get those medals again but it was certainly nice to be recognised. It’s something that stays with you forever and stays with your family forever.’’

Sergeant Tony Commadeur and Craig Miller also received bravery awards.

Senior Constables Gary Harrison, Michala Maskell and Frank Reid received commendations.

Sergeant Lukaitis holds no ill feeling towards gunman John Wason – then or now.

‘’I recognise he was a person suffering from mental health issues – I don’t think the acts he did were the acts of a person who was sane and I’ve always looked at it from that perspective,’’ he said.

‘’I feel very sorry for his mother – the pain she went through number one for losing a son but then she lost her husband a short time after that, so it would have been very difficult for her.’’

He also remembers the bravery of the members of the public who put themselves in danger to help others that night.

‘’The nurse that helped Craig Miller at the time probably saved his life.

‘’Her father who walked through the scene… he was very brave.

‘’These sort of things bring out the best in people – I think that’s the over-arching feeling for me.’’

That nurse was Mary-Ann Beckmans. She and her father, Hendrikus Beckmans, who alerted police to Craig Miller’s condition, received bravery awards, along with school teacher Harold Stirton.

Sergeant Lukaitis is stationed at Castlemaine these days and given his great love of that community and the job there are no plans to wind up the career that has consumed most of his life anytime soon.

“I still enjoy the police force… it’s a terrific job and a great career,’’ he said.

“One of the old chief commissioners, I think it was Mick Miller, said the police force is like having front-row seats at the greatest show on Earth.

‘’I’ve done 33 years and I think that’s true.’’