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In the moments before her husband shot and killed two police officers, Dezi Freeman’s wife frantically called their landlord for help.
“Andy, come down to the bus. The police are here, and they’ve surrounded the bus, and they’re trying to get in,” Mali Freeman told him.
On the morning of August 26 last year, Andrew Swift ran to the makeshift home on his Porepunkah property where the Freemans had lived for nearly four years.
This is the first time Swift’s involvement in the ordeal has been made public, with a recorded interview with the property owners posted to the Living Free Movement’s YouTube channel on Saturday detailing their version of what happened the morning Freeman opened fire.
Filmed in October 2025, the video shows Andrew and Bec Swift at the property, giving the channel’s host a tour around the Freemans’ bus, the sheds where officers took shelter, and track that Dezi Freeman disappeared along.
At the bus that morning, Swift was confronted by a “stalemate”, as uniformed and plain-clothed police officers, all wearing vests equipped with cameras, had Freeman’s home surrounded.
After shooting dead Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart, Freeman fled into the bush, sparking the largest manhunt in Victoria’s history. On March 30, he was shot dead by heavily armed police who tracked him to a remote hideout in Thologolong, near the NSW border.
Before the shooting, Swift said he had tried to help ease the tension between both parties, and told officers they were trespassing on his land “unless they had a warrant”.
“Police said they had a warrant. They showed me a bit of paper, but the whole scene … I was in no state to look at the details,” he said.
He could hear the Freemans inside the bus “totally distressed”, but despite this, “Dezi was really quite together, although heightened in anxiety, about asking the right questions”.
“At one point, they held the warrant up to the window, and they explained what the warrant was, and Dezi was basically saying it was not valid, a load of nonsense and ‘what was all this really all about’.”
Officers then escorted Swift away from the front of the bus, he said, and guarded him as he sat behind it. Swift had been sitting around the back “10 minutes, maybe 15” before the first gunshot.
“I heard another shot, looked up and thought I got a glimpse of Dezi just ducking back away.”
Swift didn’t know what had happened, and neither did the police. He wasn’t sure if it was any of the officers who had opened fire, or his tenant.
“At one point I yelled out, ‘Dezi, don’t be a dick. Just be calm or whatever.’”
He called Mali, who answered and said she was still in the bus. Then he called Dezi Freeman to ask where he was.
“On one hand, he says, ‘I’m in the bus’, and on the other hand, he says he’s … down in the paddock below. But he definitely wasn’t with Mali,” Swift said. “I can’t remember whether I hung up or he hung up.”
From there, he said he could not help the Freemans any longer.
When Swift realised officers had been injured, he helped police load an injured man into the back of his Hi-Lux to transport him down the track to a waiting ambulance. “I got into the back seat, and two police officers helped the injured officer to the back seat,” he said. “I said to the injured officer, ‘I’m gonna grab you by your belt and your vest’, and I lifted the injured officer into the back seat.”
By the time the officer was loaded into an ambulance, Swift said, police knew they had lost two of their own.
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