Waiting for Elijah: Kate Wild on Studio 10
‘One of the things that drew me to it very early on, and to write a book about it, was Elijah’s family always showed an enormous amount of compassion towards senior constable Andrew Rich who shot their son, even though they believed that there was no reason for Elijah to be killed. They said from the very beginning: ‘we don’t hold the individual police officer responsible. This is a reflection of how society approaches mental illness and assumes it’s a dangerous condition. We ask police to do things for us that nobody else wants to do, we can’t just hang our son’s death on this one individual and believe that nobody else needs to take responsibility.’ And that for me, it was an incredibly compelling reaction.’