Jodi Knott suffered ‘gratuitous cruelty’ at the hands of police. Her family wants the public to see what they did
An officer kicks Jodi Knott, in body-worn camera vision her family has fought to have released.
The shaky video on the laptop shows a naked woman crouching under a tree by a Western Sydney street, experiencing a psychotic episode.
Plain-clothes NSW police officer Senior Constable Nathan Black puts on blue surgical gloves.
“It’s not about being scared,” he says.
“It is about being scared of you,” she screams. “I’m terrified of you people. Go away.”
So begins one of the most brutal and calculated police assaults ever filmed in Australia.
Warning: This story contains confronting descriptions of violence and coarse language
The woman’s cousins, Nichole Allen and Sharee Castagna, wrap their arms around each other as they stare at the laptop. It’s the first time they’ve seen the footage.
Nichole and Sharee watch the footage of the attack.
They had to fight to have it released.
They want the public to see what was done to their loved one, and to know her name: Jodi Knott.
Jodi died of cancer 18 months after the callous 2023 attack. Her relatives want her legacy to be better police training in responding to acute mental illness.
Nichole quietly sobs as the video plays on.
“You can’t physically beat me. F*** off,” Jodi, who lived with schizophrenia, yells in the video.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Black says.
Jodi turns and runs onto the road. Black chases her and they tumble to the ground.
What happens over the next hour was later described as “gratuitous cruelty” by a District Court judge.
WARNING: Graphic violence. Police body-worn camera video of the officers’ attack on Jodi.
Black and his partner Constable Timothy Trautsch stomp on Jodi as she lays on the road. Black kicks her in the head, and at one point drags her by the hair along the bitumen, leaving her back red and raw. He later points his can of pepper spray directly at grazes on her body and sprays them.
Jodi is also sprayed at close range in the face, something that is forbidden because of the risk of eye injuries.
“Get it in her eyes, get it in her eyes,” one officer can be heard saying in footage, recorded by Black’s police-issued body-worn camera.
By the end, both men have emptied their pepper spray canisters.
“We need a taser,” Black tells his partner.
“God, please. I’m strong God, but not without you,” Jodi yells in fear.
Trautsch can be heard laughing.
“Oi, is there a long baton in the car?” Black later asks.
“Yeah, that’ll settle her down,” Trautsch replies.
Jodi’s cousins stop the video. They walk outside to get some air.
Jodi’s cousins take a break after watching the video.
“They didn’t care that there were cameras around or that their body-cam footage was on,” Sharee says.
“That says to me that there is a significant cultural issue within the police … that this type of behaviour is OK.”
“She had nothing on her,” says Nichole. “She was naked. She’s vulnerable.
“What is she going to do to them? Two burly blokes rocking up like that. She’s not going to do anything.
“They chose to continuously brutalise her and attack her every step, at every moment. She was down on that ground and they just continued to lay into her. It’s horrific.”
‘A lost little soul’
The assault happened just 300 metres from Amber Laurel Correctional Centre. Jodi, then 48, had been released earlier that day.
She had become disoriented while walking towards Emu Plains train station and ended up in a cul-de-sac. She was off her schizophrenia medication.
Jodi died of cancer in 2024.
The incident that landed Jodi in prison happened two days earlier. Jodi had tried to fill a prescription but the chemist called police after she started shouting.
When police arrived there was a struggle, and she was pepper sprayed and arrested.
Nichole said Jodi’s close friend and carer, a man named Jason, had been helping her with her medications, but he had recently died.
She said Jodi had lived with mental illness for decades, after experiencing a traumatic childhood.
Jodi was like a sister to Nichole when they were children, she said. The pair were close until Jodi moved away with her mother.
“She was only six months under me,” Nichole says. “She was a lost little soul that just needed help now and then.”
The brutal bashing wasn’t Jodi’s last violent encounter with police.
Four Corners can reveal that three months later police were called to her Moorebank home over reports she was pacing her driveway waving a kitchen knife.
Officers arrived, tasered her twice and arrested her.
Police did not take a specialist mental health clinician, known as a PACER nurse, to any of these call-outs.
When the case was first made public, NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Dave Hudson said it was one of the worst cases of misconduct he had seen in his more than 40 years as a police officer.
Cop boasted: ‘We caved her’
In the hours after his brutal attack on Jodi, while she was still recovering in hospital, Senior Constable Black messaged a colleague in Facebook Messenger.
He sent the police officer a video he filmed on his mobile phone at the beginning of the incident.
“Both OC (pepper spray) cans emptied on her. Was f***ed.”
The next day, Black sent another message.
“She was f***ed, the whole body-worn is so good, shows her being f***ed. Nurses are lodging a complaint. [A senior officer] is investigating because we caved her, but she had a hold of the cuffs, and we had no other options,” he wrote.
Black also sent two clips of the body-worn video of the incident to the colleague. Police body-worn video is considered protected information, so sending it was a crime.
Nathan Black (left) and Timothy Trautsch (right).
In October last year, Black and Trautsch were jailed over the assault. Black received a non-parole period of three years and three months; Trautsch received three years.
Because the CCTV footage of Jodi being assaulted was pixelated and the media didn’t report her name, Sharee, Nichole and the extended family didn’t know it was her until Four Corners contacted them earlier this year.
“It’s just completely devastated us,” Nichole says.
“We would have been there all through it to have her back, but we’ve got her back now, so that’s the main thing.”
“We hope that this gives her [a] voice,” Sharee says.
Nichole and Sharee say they will always love their cousin.
The family wants police to improve how officers interact with people experiencing mental illness.
“This was our cousin and we were proud of Jodi,” Nichole says.
“We don’t care what anyone else says. We’re proud and we loved her to death. Always have and always will. We just wanted to let everybody know. She had a face, she had a name, and it was Jodi.”
