A police officer has broken down while recalling the fruitless search for a retiree whose body was later discovered in the stairwell of a Sydney shopping centre, while a colleague has suggested they should have searched the stairs themselves.
Bernard Gore, 71, was found dead in the fire stairwell at Westfield Bondi Junction in late January 2017 some three weeks after he went missing.
The Tasmanian man, who had early-onset dementia, planned to meet his wife outside the centre’s Woolworths at 1.15pm on 6 January having earlier left his daughter’s Woollahra apartment. But he never arrived.
Constable Rebecca Daniels, who led the search, was questioned on Monday as the inquest into Gore’s death resumed at the NSW coroners court.
She said the three-week investigation “consumed” her and the entirety of the Rose Bay police station.
“Even if we were patrolling other areas for different jobs … we still had Mr Gore in the back of our mind,” Daniels told the inquest.
“I was looking for him on my way to and from work. I would purposefully go out of my way and go to train stations on my way home from work, just to see if he was there, particularly since we had such a good description of him.”
The police officer said she had his name in the search field of her phone and “would constantly refresh it just to see if he’d been found”.
Gore’s disappearance was the first missing person case in Daniels’ two years as a junior constable.
“We just wanted to bring him home,” she said.
“My grandad also suffers from Alzheimer’s and has gone missing before.”
Daniels and Constable Ramon Gilarte attended the Westfield’s security control room on January 9 in a bid to pin down Gore’s whereabouts.
“It was mentioned they had reviewed the CCTV and hadn’t found him ... attending the Westfield in the three or four days between Mr Gore being declared missing,” Daniels said.
The two-officer team searched the centre for several hours and Daniels said they asked guards to assist by checking the fire stairs which – unbeknown to them – stretched for 14km kilometres in total.
“Looking back on it now, we should have done it ourselves,” Gilarte said.
“Rather than trusting their protocols.”
The inquest heard in 2019 that a “code grey” – which would have triggered a full search of the centre – was not activated by staff.
A guard defended the search effort for Gore suggesting staff combed over “basically the whole mall”.
The inquest before deputy state coroner Derek Lee continues.