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When Chamindika Jayawardena suddenly stopped answering her phone on the last day in February, her brother Kalana – who goes by Karl – began to worry.
But Karl’s mother calmed him down, reminding him Chami was having a party for her 47th birthday at a winery.
Her actual birthday fell on Sunday, March 1, the following day.
When Sunday rolled around, Karl called Chami to wish her a happy birthday. No response. Then he called a couple more times. Nothing. Then he started calling friends who had been to her party the day before. The WhatsApp messages he was sending her weren’t even being read.
This was unusual: Karl and Chami talked up to 10 times a day, even though she lived in Gippsland, and he on the west coast of the United States.
With the help of friends in Victoria, Karl learned that Chami and her partner Aaron Hammond had been dropped back at their house, on a winding road outside of Moe, after the party. Neither of them was answering their phones.
“That’s when my alarm bell started ringing,” he said.
By that point, it had been 36 hours since he’d last heard Chami’s voice.
“I urged the police to go break in [to their house] and they agreed to,” Karl said.
When police rang him back, it was with the worst news imaginable: they told him they had found Chami and Hammond’s bodies in the house.
Karl said his sister met Hammond after separating from a previous marriage. While she was building a new house in Melbourne, she rented an apartment. However, when the landlord decided he wanted his property back, she was suddenly given three months’ notice to leave.
Around the same time, Chami began seeing Hammond after meeting him on a dating app. When she was given notice at her apartment, she decided to move in with her new boyfriend while she waited for her house-build to finish. In the end, she never left Hammond’s house.
After their bodies were discovered, neighbours reported hearing loud bangs late on Saturday night, after the couple had returned from the party. Though the matter is with the Coroners Court of Victoria, Karl has heard from police that his sister and Hammond died of gunshot wounds in an apparent murder suicide.
A week after Chami’s death, Karl arrived in Melbourne to attend an “almsgiving” – a Buddhist ceremony in which a monk blessed his sister’s soul.
Karl remained close with Chami, even though study took them to opposite sides of the world. She came to Australia to do an undergraduate degree in computer science, while he went to the US on a scholarship to undertake a PhD on his way to becoming an engineer at a major tech company.
“I’m from the US, where guns are very common,” Karl said. “I can walk into Walmart and walk off with a gun. [But] I never thought in Australia, people can have guns that easily.”
Karl said Hammond had told him he owned guns, but he believed at the time they were air rifles. “And I [later] found out he always kept a loaded gun in the master bedroom closet.”
Under Victorian law, firearms have to be unloaded and kept in a room with locks on all openings in order to be stored legally. Karl says this needs to stop.
“How to prevent that from happening is [police] to do more vigorous unannounced site visits to see whether people who are holding gun licences are obeying. At the same time, they need to have psychiatric evaluation at least once a year for people issued guns.”
Karl is planning Chami’s funeral on Sunday without his family at his side in Australia – his mother is undergoing chemotherapy – but since arriving he has been comforted and pleasantly surprised by hearing how much Chami meant to so many people in Victoria.
“She’d talk to anybody and help them in any way possible she could, whether it was money or if they had trouble at a friend level she’d do that too. She had no brakes, she had been like family to all her friends,” he said.
“I feel pretty proud about her. I had never seen that side of her.”
Still, there remains an empty void, which he says grows deeper from the moment he wakes up each day. Now, he plans to fill that pain by honouring the one he lost.
“She always wanted to start an orphanage,” he said. “I’m going to fulfil that dream one day.”
Lifeline 13 11 14, Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
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