A former Northern Territory youth prison guard has denied filming boys in the shower but confessed to inviting detainees to perform fellatio on him and daring a child to eat excrement.
While giving evidence at the juvenile justice royal commission, former Don Dale Detention Centre Youth Justice Officer Conan Zamolo rejected allegations from three separate detainees that he recorded a child masturbating in the shower.
The inmates claimed they saw vision of a naked boy on Mr Zamolo's phone, but he said he only led them to believe he had done it.
“I never recorded no kids in the shower. I may have pretended to . . . I'm not a bully,” he told the juvenile justice royal commission.
Police investigated the claims but the bodybuilder wasn’t charged in relation to the incident, only with steroid possession once officers searched his house.
Mr Zamolo said he was “just mucking around” when he dared a child to “eat shit” and posted the footage to Snapchat.
Footage filmed by the guard shows a young inmate eating something while Mr Zamolo urges him to “go, go, go . . . eat that little bit of shit.”
“It’s just the kids goofing around. Something to pass the day,” Mr Zamolo told the inquiry’s Darwin hearing on Monday.
“I can see now it was inappropriate.”
The boy was surrounded by several cheering peers during the August 2014 incident, while Mr Zamolo and around four other staff members present weren’t compelled to intervene.
Conan later gave the child coke to wash his mouth out, and posted the footage filmed on his smartphone to the messaging app.
Mr Zamolo said he’s posted footage of detainees a few times on Snapchat, insisting he’d gotten consent from detainees first.
Another clip filmed by the guard late at night shows a boy hiding under his sheet in his cell when Mr Zamolo calls out and makes a reference to fellatio.
“I was actually just going to say goodnight to them because I was leaving shift,” Mr Zamolo said.
“I knew they’d take it as a joke, or I just assumed they would take it as a joke.”
Other vision filmed by Mr Zamolo showed a boy looking uncomfortable while urinating in a toilet late at night, when the guard says “oi, what are you doing you little gay dog?”
“The only reason I walked in was because he was taking ages," Mr Zamolo said.
The guard was never disciplined for any of those incidents, but was later sacked for an unrelated matter.
The Darwin hearings continue.
