By Neda Vanovac
Teen inmate Dylan Voller says being hooded in a restraint chair and tear-gassed are the scariest things to have ever happened to him, and that he felt like he was “going to die”.
The 19-year-old inmate at Darwin’s adult prison is a key witness the royal commission into youth detention and child protection, and has spoken publicly for the first time, giving several hours of evidence.
Images of Voller hooded and shackled to a chair in an ABC Four Corners program were beamed into households across the country and pushed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to call for the investigation.
He said when restrained in the chair he felt completely defenceless.
“I was getting dizzy from panicking, I was getting agitated because the officer holding the camera was sitting there. He’d act nice and then turn the camera off and start trying to agitate me and then turn the camera back on,” he said.
“The feeling of not being able to do anything, those officers could have done anything to me for that three-and-a-half hours and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.
“Fear of them having control … there was no responsible person who would have said, ‘that’s enough, we need to get him out of that restraint chair now, he’s been in there for too long’.”
He said he vomited in his mouth while hooded, and that he wet himself while restrained in the chair.
“Being put in a restraint chair was one of the scariest things that’s happened to me, that and the tear-gassing,” he said.