Making a fighting return

nAs Acting Sergeant Darren Murrihy fires off rounds from his semi-automatic pistol in the shooting range at the Victoria Police Academy, the target he hits with remarkable accuracy is adorned with symbols of luck.

On the rectangle board that hangs metres away, the playing card icons of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades surround the silhouette of a person at its centre.

It’s symbolically fitting, because the very fact A/ Sgt Murrihy is alive today comes down to pure luck.

It’s a cold, wet day in May 2021 when A/Sgt Murrihy is nearing the end of his Operational Safety and Tactics Training (OSTT) — mandatory lessons covering skills such as personal defence tactics, firearm use and arrest techniques — that all police complete every year to remain able to serve on the frontline.

For most police, it’s a routine part of their job, but for A/Sgt Murrihy it’s an extraordinary milestone in a recovery from an accident that almost killed him in the Victorian snowfields.

It was 3 September 2018 when A/Sgt Murrihy and a colleague headed to the mountains to make the most of a weekend of good snowfall.

After a morning spent skiing the slopes of Mount Buller, A/Sgt Murrihy was coming to the end of a ski-cross course when he tried to bring his board to a stop.

However, the board dug in and A/Sgt Murrihy was thrown face-first into the snow and hard ice, changing his life forever.

The impact of the fall fractured the C2 vertebrae of A/Sgt Murrihy’s spine. It was a grade three fracture, the most severe for injuries of that nature.

Well known for being one of the injuries that paralysed famed Superman actor Christopher Reeve, it holds a macabre nickname for its usual fatal severity — the hangman’s fracture.

When the accident occurred, A/Sgt Murrihy was making the most of his career with Victoria Police, which began in 2010.

Since 2015, he had been an operator within the Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT), one of Victoria Police’s go-to units for specialist tactics, equipment, and trained negotiators for incidents such as sieges, suicide intervention, and counter terrorism response.

He had an active lifestyle and was a loving husband with three young boys, all aged under four at the time.

In short, A/Sgt Murrihy had every reason to cling to life as he lay injured in the snow. “My wife puts it best.

She says the universe realised it made a mistake when I had my accident and went about fixing it,” A/Sgt Murrihy said.

“Even though what happened to me was terrible, everything that happened afterwards was near-perfect and allowed me to make the recovery I have made.”

The events that aligned to save A/Sgt Murrihy’s life were indeed remarkable.

Firstly, his crash was witnessed by an occupational therapist named Nikki, who recognised that A/Sgt Murrihy had suffered a serious spinal injury.

Nikki’s husband had been a ski patroller for more than 15 years, meaning she knew to immediately alert ski-lift operators, who quickly contacted the on-duty ski patrollers.

The ski patrollers arrived in just four minutes. Fortunately, A/Sgt Murrihy was laying only 400 metres from the medical centre. He was unconscious, but medics cleared his tongue from blocking his airway and then stabilised his body with a vacuum spinal board, which was instrumental in minimising further spinal damage.

An air ambulance, remarkably already in the area for another incident, made A/Sgt Murrihy the priority and arrived in just 20 minutes. The clear weather allowed it to land just 500 metres from the incident scene.

From the accident at about 11.30am, A/Sgt Murrihy was in the air on his way to hospital by 1.30pm.

Three days later he underwent painstaking surgery at the Austin Hospital where a small piece of bone from his hip and screws were used to stabilise the fracture.

There, he regained consciousness for the first time since the accident. He had no memory of his trip to the snow and no use of his body below his neck, but he did have some feeling in his feet.

A/Sgt Murrihy spent another week in intensive care before being moved to a dedicated spinal ward, coincidentally on his youngest son’s first birthday.

The surgery was eventually revealed to be a success and, slowly but surely, A/Sgt Murrihy started to wrestle back control of his broken body, with his competitive edge coming to the fore.

“One of my first exercises was breathing into an apparatus to build lung capacity and remove fluid. That machine gives you a score. I wanted to know my score every time, so I could beat it next time,” A/Sgt Murrihy said.

“That was my mindset — I don’t need to achieve greatness in a short amount of time, I’ve just got to be better than I was last time.”

A week after the surgery, A/Sgt Murrihy began to move his fingers. Unable to move anything else, he went through the exercise of touching his thumb to the tip of each of his fingers for hours at a time.

Another week later, A/Sgt Murrihy was able to stand again.

“It was a difficult, complicated process, but the first time I tried, I stood up. Once I stood up, I knew at that moment I was going to be able to walk, and if I was going to be able to walk, I knew I’d be able to run. It just went on from there,” he said.

Seven weeks after his accident, A/Sgt Murrihy left the rehabilitation centre, walking out the doors unassisted.

While much of his focus throughout his rehabilitation had been on what it would mean for his personal and family life, returning to his life in uniform remained a key goal.

After all, A/Sgt Murrihy had seen the best of the blue family as his colleagues rallied around him.

His supervising officer, Superintendent Steve Reynolds, attended the hospital on the night of the accident when things were touch and go.

“He would have faced some confronting things that night. I can’t speak more highly of Steve and the support he gave myself and my family throughout my recovery,” A/Sgt Murrihy said.

In April 2019, seven months after his accident, A/Sgt Murrihy put on the uniform and went back to work.

Still recovering from his accident, he entered a growing network of non-operational positions purposefully created by Victoria Police for officers who are returning to work after a period of time off, be it for injuries, mental health reasons or maternity leave.

A/Sgt Murrihy was stationed at the Divisional Operations Support Office (DOSO) at the Geelong Police Station, helping frontline police by providing real-time monitoring of police and public systems, including CCTV, police radio communications and crime activity and trends.

“To have these non-operational positions is so important in allowing people return to full-time duties progressively and in an environment that is a lot less stressful and demanding than the frontline,” A/Sgt Murrihy said.

After two years at the DOSO and having passed his OSTT qualification without issue, A/Sgt Murrihy is now eyeing a return to frontline duties.

Getting back into his beloved CIRT is something he also refuses to take off the table.

Regardless of what his future looks like, A/Sgt Murrihy will always be thankful.

Thankful for the unwavering support of his wife and children, the ski patrollers and paramedics that saved his life, the doctors, nurses and health professionals who helped fix his injuries and get him back on his feet, his police colleagues who checked in on him, the management team at the Geelong Police Station that helped him get back to work, and his family who supported him.

“What can I say other than thank you, to everyone involved,” Sgt Murrihy said. “I’m only here today because of them.”

Editorial and photography: Grant Condon