On this day a year ago the lives of six young men intersected in the most horrible way. Most, if not all, were drunk. Within minutes, one of them was dead on the side of a road, 200 metres from the Alice Springs CBD.

According to testimony given to the court in December 2009, most of the five young boys who admitted responsibility for the death of Kwementyaye Ryder spent the rest of that day drinking and partying, unaware that the man they had left unconscious on the road earlier that day had died within seconds of them leaving him.

Within 10 days they were all remanded in custody in the local jail, charged with the murder of Kwementyaye Ryder. By April this year they had all entered pleas of guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter and were sentenced to various periods of imprisonment. In less than two weeks one of those men will be freed from the Alice Springs jail.

Having sat through every day of the committal hearings in Alice Springs Magistrates Court and the two days of their plea hearings in the NT Supreme Court, there are thousands of words that I could write about these events. In late December I reported on the committal proceedings in the Alice Springs Magistrate’s Court in this short piece for the ABC’s The Drum.

For now, I’ll leave the commentary and reporting to others. In time I will write about these matters at greater length. For mine, the best of the recent reporting on this matter is Liz Jackson’s report “A Dog Act” on the ABC’s Four Corners last Monday July 19.

I would also recommend that you have a look at the Sentencing Remarks by the (then) NT Chief Justice Brian Martin and the other material at the Four Corners site here.

What I want to do today is present, a year to the day later, my photos of some of the places around Alice Springs that were relevant to this matter.

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Bojangles is where several of the boys who put up their hands to the killing of Kwementyaye Ryder started or continued what was to be a long weekend of drinking.

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By late in the evening of Friday July 24, 2009, all the boys (and Kwementyaye Ryder, though it is not known if they met) were at the Lasseter’s Casino. The boys left the casino at about 6 o’clock on the morning of Saturday  July 25 by car. The agreed facts tendered to the court when they were sentenced noted that:

At approximately 6am on Saturday 25 July 2009, the five offenders … drove from the Lasseter’s Casino travelling to the Alice Springs CBD before driving through the Todd River bed. Anton Kloeden was the driver; Scott Doody, Tim Hird and Glen Swain were in the rear passenger seat and Joshua Spears in the front passenger seat. All the passengers had consumed a large amount of alcohol during the preceding hours.

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A few hundred yards towards the Alice Springs CBD, the boys turned off the Tunk’s Crossing into the riverbed and headed north.

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For many people living in Alice Springs, the homeless campers in the Todd River bed are little more than shadows on the landscape.