the last picture of Cassius Turvey, a 15-year-old Aboriginal boy of Western Australia’s Noongar and Yamatji nations, showed him lying unconscious on a hospital bed, attached to a ventilator. His head, shaved by medics, was marked with a heavy gash. He was “an innocent victim of a violent attack”, the state’s police said.

Cassius was walking home from school with friends in Perth, Western Australia’s capital, on October 13th, when a car pulled up next to them, the boys allege, and passengers jumped out and assaulted them, yelling racial slurs. Cassius was allegedly battered with a metal pole. His injuries were so severe that he died ten days later.