On the day before he died in the back of a police van, foaming at the mouth, Pasquale Giorgio asked an officer for help.
It was early April 2016 and Giorgio was homeless and far from home.
His family were worried sick.
Giorgio had chronic paranoid schizophrenia. His life had spiralled out of control after the death of his mother and he had fallen through the cracks of the South Australian mental health system, disappeared from his home town of Adelaide and managed to hitchhike all the way to Queensland.
The deaths of Australians experiencing homelessness are largely invisible. No government in the country attempts to count or understand what is driving them, putting us at odds with other western nations.
In an attempt to shine a light on this crisis, Guardian Australia has spent 12 months identifying and investigating 627 homelessness deaths.
The investigation involved analysis of more than a decade of non-public death reports to state and territory coroners, a review of inquest findings since 2010, and dozens of interviews with rough sleepers, victims’ families, researchers and advocates.
The Guardian has found that people experiencing homelessness are dying at an average age of 44. That is vastly premature and a life expectancy gap of more than three decades.
It is the first time the life expectancy gap has been measured at a national level and, despite the data’s limitations, the finding is broadly in line with local studies in Perth and Sydney.
The investigation also found suicide and overdose, known as deaths of despair, are primary drivers of death. Researchers say such deaths are inextricably linked to the despair and hopelessness of homelessness.
The investigation identified a wide range of systemic failings contributing to deaths, including gaps in health and mental healthcare, the critical undersupply of public housing and failures of the justice system.
Police had approached him near a McDonald’s on the main street of Surfers Paradise, where he was acting strangely, including pulling faces at customers.
Giorgio told an officer he was homeless and needed community assistance.
Police had no direct training in dealing with homelessness. They didn’t know the whereabouts of local shelters and their policy was simply to move rough sleepers on, out of Surfers Paradise.
Giorgio was told to walk off in the vague direction of the courthouse, in the hope he would link up with a support service there.
He never made it.
The next day officers were dispatched after separate reports that a man was acting strangely at a restaurant at Broadbeach. They found Giorgio walking along the Gold Coast Highway.
He exposed himself to the officers who, claiming fear for their safety, used force while arresting him, pinning him to the ground face-down.
They said they were left with no time to check his record on the police database, which would have told them he was homeless and experiencing a mental health crisis.
Giorgio struggled to breathe during the arrest. He was suffering positional asphyxia, something he was vulnerable to due to his obesity and pre-existing heart disease.
An inquest into his death found that despite noticing he was foaming at the mouth, the officers left him in the back of a police van and waited for an ambulance instead of immediately providing CPR.
Back in Adelaide, Olivia Centofanti still remembers the call notifying the family of her uncle’s death.
The same uncle who taught her to drive, who loved a laugh and would do anything for her, had died in police custody, she was told.
“The first thing I think we thought was, ‘How? How?’,” Centofanti tells Guardian Australia. “My mum was on the phone, she was hysterical, trying to relay information.”
“‘Pasq’s dead. Pasq’s dead.’ She just kept saying that.”
The inquest later found Giorgio died of ischaemic cardiomyopathy, a condition restricting blood supply to the heart muscle, after a period of restraint.
Centofanti and her family were later shown footage of the arrest.
“They said it was resisting arrest,” she says. “I didn’t see resisting arrest, I saw a man who was confused and didn’t know what he was being arrested for.”
Guardian Australia has spent 12 months investigating the deaths of people experiencing homelessness.
Giorgio died aged 54, three decades before the mean age of death in Australia, in line with a vast life expectancy gap common to rough sleepers.
The practice of enforcing minor public order offences against rough sleepers, as occurred in Giorgio’s case, has long concerned experts and homeless groups.
Rough sleepers are more visible to police, which leads to increased scrutiny and interaction. They are also more susceptible to the impact of enforcement, including fines, move-on orders and arrests, which compounds their disadvantage.
The Guardian has also found that such enforcement is leading to their deaths. In at least four cases, people experiencing homelessness died after arrest on public order offences.
They include Pierino Taranto, a 65-year-old rough sleeper in Box Hill, Victoria, who was arrested and handcuffed for public drunkenness outside his previous longtime family home.
While handcuffed, he tripped over an officer’s outstretched leg, hitting his head on the ground.
Another rough sleeper and an Indigenous woman, Maureen Mandijarra, died in a police lock-up, likely from a diabetes-related infection, after being arrested for drinking at her local oval in Broome.
Mandijarra was 44. An inquest later heard she had been lying in the same position on the concrete floor of cell four in the Broome police station for at least six hours before police attempted to rouse her.
A Queensland man, John Michael Spence, 51, was jailed for the first time in his life on public order offences, mainly alcohol-related. He died in the Capricornia correctional centre’s health centre after having ingested a huge amount of caffeine which triggered a seizure.
‘There’s no easy fix’
In 2020, criminal law expert Prof Luke McNamara and a team of researchers interviewed 37 lawyers and social workers who specialise in representing and helping people experiencing homelessness. They also spoke to magistrates about the way courts handle cases involving rough sleepers.
The study found that, despite the decriminalisation of vagrancy since the 1970s, rough sleepers were still “vulnerable to law enforcement targeting and harassment”.
Rough sleepers were both more visible to police, leading to more frequent interactions, and more susceptible to the impact of enforcement, the research found.
That’s because they generally cannot afford fines, move-on orders simply shift them away from known places of relative safety, and arrests and imprisonment lead to ongoing entanglement with the criminal justice system.
“If your life … is living on the streets, you’re really exposed to those kinds of ‘low-level’ forms of policing and criminalisation, and they can have really big consequences,” McNamara says generally, not commenting on the four cases identified by the Guardian.
“The sorts of behaviours that we’re often talking about are really behaviours we would regard as nuisance behaviours: swearing, consuming alcohol, possibly urinating, being a bit in the way of pedestrians. It’s kind of low-level stuff.”
McNamara says his study shows some interactions with police are positive for rough sleepers.
Homelessness Australia’s chief executive, Kate Colvin, says that, even where there is proper training and an intention to help, police are hamstrung by a lack of housing and overstretched support services.
“There’s nowhere for people to go,” Colvin says. “So the police are in a situation where they are being left to deal with a situation that governments are not properly addressing. There’s no easy fix to the fact that someone is on the street … there’s nothing they can do with that person that will end their homelessness. There’s no housing for them to go to.”
In response to questions about Giorgio’s death, Gold Coast police said in a statement they are always concerned for the safety of the community, including those “who can be more susceptible to victimisation, which can include rough sleepers”.
Police said they worked with the housing department, the city of Gold Coast and non-governmental organisations to connect rough sleepers with support and help them into housing.
The coroner’s findings did not criticise police for their interactions with Giorgio in the days before his death and found the force used by arresting officers was “not excessive or gratuitous”.
But the coroner was critical of the police delay in providing CPR and officers’ failure to recognise that Giorgio’s “unconsciousness, inadequate breathing and foaming at the mouth were strong indicators of a man verging upon cardiac arrest”.
The coroner also acknowledged concerns about “the policing of public order laws and the impact on disadvantaged populations such as the homeless and mentally ill people” but said it was not the role of the court to advocate on the issue.
Centofanti still seethes over the way her uncle was treated. First by the mental health system in South Australia, which failed utterly in her uncle’s care, and later by police.
“It didn’t have to be like that,” she said. “He was a 50-something-year-old man who was starving and dying of thirst, he wouldn’t have been a threat to them.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
