The man who was with Rebecca Lyn Maher in the days before she died in a Maitland police cell in 2016 has told court how the pair ended up on Wollombi Road the night police detained the Wiradjuri woman at Cessnock.
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The man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, gave evidence at deputy state coroner Teresa O'Sullivan's inquest into the death of Ms Maher on Tuesday.
Ms Maher was detained - not arrested - after police deemed her to be heavily intoxicated in the early hours of July 19, 2016.
She was placed in a cell at Maitland police station just before 1.30am and was found dead, from what an autopsy later determined to be "mixed drug toxicity", prior to 6am.
The man was questioned by counsel assisting the coroner David Buchanan and legal representatives of some other parties involved in the inquest.
He often responded by saying he could not remember when descriptions of events were put to him in the court, but he gave some detail about the pair's activities in the lead-up to Ms Maher's death.
The man told the court said he bought alprazolam - Xanax - pills in a Newcastle park before the pair travelled to Maitland and then Cessnock on public transport, where Ms Maher had a prescription for alprazolam dispensed at a pharmacy on July 18.
The witness said they also bought the drug ice while in Cessnock and took it at a house.
He told the court he and Ms Maher had no money to get home and were walking along Wollombi Road in an attempt to hitch-hike when police found them in the early hours of July 19 - they had otherwise planned to sleep on cardboard boxes behind a nearby shop and catch a bus to Newcastle when the sun came up.
When police approached the pair, the witness said he gave his pill bottle to Ms Maher.
"We just seen the police and freaked," he said.
Related reading: Woman found dead at Maitland police station
The man said Ms Maher told him she placed the pills in her vagina to hide the medication from police, but under further questioning he conceded he did not see her do so and that he had assumed that was what she did.
When police decided to take Ms Maher back to Maitland, the witness asked to go too because he had no other way of leaving Cessnock.
He said Ms Maher was "determined to get a drink" at a nearby store but an "argument" broke out between her and police when she tried to leave.
"I remember them [police] pull up and Rebecca wanted to get a drink and they were getting dirty that she wouldn't listen and they said 'bang, you're coming with me'," the witness told the court.
He said he did not know how many benzodiazepine pills Ms Maher had taken nor her level of intoxication.
The witness waited at Maitland police station until he was told Ms Maher had died later that morning.
The inquest continues on Wednesday, with evidence expected from Sergeant Nathan Brooks, the officer who first found Ms Maher and her companion on Wollombi Road.
Ms O'Sullivan ruled on Wednesday afternoon that the other officers who dealt with Ms Maher the morning she died who were scheduled to give evidence during the inquest would have to leave the court while their colleagues occupied the witness box.
It came after submissions against the move from the officers' legal representatives who argued that allowing them to remain in the court was a matter of "procedural fairness" and a decision to the contrary would be "a significant deviation from the process of this court".
Mr Buchanan, who made the application, said it was "natural" and "only human" for people who were party to the same event to be influenced by the accounts of other people.
He said interactions between the officers on the morning Ms Maher died "go to the issues" in the case.
Ms O'Sullivan said it was "a very natural and very common occurrence that people are influenced by what they hear".
"Their evidence is the most important evidence in these proceedings," she told the court.
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