Exclusive: Dawn Cook once believed that the ordeal she and her husband Andy faced four years ago was a singular nightmare.
Having established their life in the area, the couple applied for citizenship in 2021, a process that required a police background check.
While Dawn’s report came back clean, Andy’s results were shockingly different.
“We were informed he supposedly had an alias and was involved in various crimes, including larceny, drug trafficking, car theft, and weapons offenses,” Dawn shared with 9news.com.au.
As a result, Andy’s citizenship application was immediately suspended.
According to documents reviewed by 9news.com.au, Andy was listed as having committed numerous crimes in South Australia from 1978 to 1995 under the alias “Andrew Cool.”
He had supposedly been convicted of carrying an offensive weapon in 1978, speeding and failing to comply with traffic directions in 1991, and producing cannabis in 1995.
It was also supposedly charged with larceny in 1981, but not convicted.
Andy denied having committed the crimes, which occurred before he moved to Australia in 2009 and did not appear on prior police checks.
Andy also denied ever going by the alias Andrew Cool.
Dawn went into problem-solving mode when she saw what Andy had been accused of.
She contacted state and federal police, immigration, and the British consulate.
She paid $500 to speak with a lawyer, went to Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s office for advice, and made monthly calls to the Department of Home Affairs.
“I was spending all my spare time trying to contact people to sort the bloody mess out,” Dawn said.
For months, she got nowhere.
A doctor was able to provide records that proved Andy was living in the UK at the time of the crimes, so he couldn’t have committed them.
But that proof wouldn’t help if no one would listen.
“We had no idea what the endpoint was going to be,” Dawn said of that awful time of their lives.
“Andy was convinced he was going to be made to go back to England.”
The whole ordeal came to a sudden and surprising end after almost a year of fighting.
During one of her regular calls to the Department of Home Affairs, Dawn was asked to put everything in an email and spent three hours detailing her and Andy’s experience.
His citizenship was finally approved in August 2022, a year after they both applied.
Dawn and Andy’s citizenship ceremony was held via video call a few weeks later.
“It was surreal,” she said.
”After all we had been through it just felt like a huge anticlimax.”
Dawn said they were never given an explanation as to what had gone wrong with Andy’s police check.
An Australian Federal Police (AFP) spokesperson told 9news.com.au that it was unusual for a police check to return an incorrect result.
“In the last 12 months, less than 0.0001 per cent of checks had to be reissued by the AFP,” they said.
Individuals who believe their police check has returned an incorrect result can dispute it on the AFP police check website.
The Department of Home Affairs said it did not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons.
The Cooks put the whole ordeal behind them and didn’t think much about it again until earlier this month, when Dawn came across Smith’s story.
The 28-year-old from the UK got a police check that said she’d been convicted of four crimes in Australia, one of which occurred when she wasn’t in the country.
She told 9news.com.au she didn’t commit any of the crimes but feared she could be forced to return to the UK.
The AFP told 9news.com.au Smith’s police check was corrected and reissued.
But Dawn is disheartened to think other people are going through the stress and heartache she did even years after Andy’s case was resolved.
