A Queensland correctional services officer assessed Kerrie Struhs as posing no immediate risk to others three weeks before her eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth died, a Brisbane inquest has heard. The officer made that call without access to details of Struhs' past offending, which included a child-neglect conviction. Coroner Ainslie Kirkegaard is presiding over the inquest into Elizabeth's death.
The assessment, and what the officer couldn't see
The gap is the story. Struhs had already been sentenced to five months' jail for child neglect after failing to take Elizabeth to hospital to treat her type 1 diabetes in 2019. That history didn't reach the officer who signed off on the risk assessment. So a person with a documented record of neglecting a diabetic child was cleared on the basis of an incomplete file.
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Three weeks later, Elizabeth was dead.
The inquest has previously heard that the girl was nearly dead and in a coma when she presented at hospital. Kirkegaard has now been told, in effect, that the system's front-line risk judgment was made blind to the one piece of information that mattered most.
A five-month sentence, then a clean sheet
It's worth being blunt about the sequence. Struhs was convicted and jailed over the 2019 neglect. She came back into contact with corrections. An officer assessed her. The assessment came back clean — not because the officer ignored the record, but because the record wasn't there to read.
That's a records problem dressed up as a judgment call. And it's the kind of failure that tends to recur, because nobody in the chain owns the whole picture. Corrections holds one slice. Courts hold another. Health services hold a third. The officer standing in front of the offender holds whatever happens to have been pushed through that day.
What Kirkegaard is weighing
The coroner's task is to establish how Elizabeth died and whether anything could reasonably have prevented it. The assessment detail lands squarely in that second question. If the officer had known about the 2019 conviction, would the outcome have changed? Would there have been follow-up? Would anyone have checked on Elizabeth in the intervening weeks?
Those are the questions the inquest will press on. The facts on the table so far don't answer them.
Where the inquest goes from here
Kirkegaard's findings aren't due yet, and the inquest continues in Brisbane. What's already clear is that the hearing has exposed a hole between Queensland's correctional records and the people making risk calls on the ground. Whether that becomes a formal recommendation on information-sharing — and whether anyone is held accountable for the gap — is the next thing to watch.
Elizabeth would have turned nine. She didn't.
