Auckland cemetery scene of siege

Press, 30 January 1984, Page 9

Auckland cemetery scene of siege

PA Auckland A gunman stalked the police among the trees and headstones of an Auckland cemetery on Saturday, wounding two of them after earlier shooting and wounding five civilians. The drama began at 1.15 a.m. when the man shot the civilians in Karangahape Road. Then, as the police turned out to the emergency, the man donned camouflage battle-dress, blackened his face, and -armed with the shotgun and a .303 rifle moved into the cover of the old cemetery. A dog handler, Constable Grant Bradford, and Sergeant Murray Morrisey were among the first police on the scene after the wounded civilians fled from the shotgun volley. As the two policemen moved into the area they were met by a fusillade of shotgun blasts which wounded them both. They took cover, Constable Bradford with pellet wounds above one eye and in an arm and Sergeant Morrisey with pellets in the right shoulder. Detective Inspector A. B. Edwards said the gunman then moved further into the cemetery and fired shots ineffectuallyat a police car at the

Symonds Street-motorway off-ramp intersection. Moving down to a carpark off Upper Queen Street, the young man then fired on another parked police car, this time using solid slugs in the shotgun. “The shot demolished the plastic siren on the car and narrowly missed two constables standing beside it," Mr Edwards said. One of the policemen suffered minor injuries from flying plastic fragments. Sergeant Morrisey and Constable Bradford, under cover in bush, then heard the man call out that he wanted to give himself up. They yelled to him to come out in the open and put down his weapons and the gunman was seized before members of the armed offenders squad arrived. The police said that before the shooting began, the gunman hid his weapons behind the cemetery wall then crossed the street and spoke briefly to a transvestite. The transvestite suffered pellet wounds to one leg. Another gunshot victim, Damien Makiiti, welcomed guests at his twenty-first birthday party on Saturday with a stiff handshake. Mr Makiiti, a Mount Eden brewery worker, was nurs-

ing pellet wounds in the back, legs, head, and right elbow from the Karangahape Road shotgun attack. Mr Makiiti was trapped in a takeaway bar when he heard three explosions. “Everyone round me scrambled for cover, but I thought it was just firecrackers, so I kept standing there.” he said. “I felt this thing hitting me like hailstones it really stung. "The first I knew I had been shot was when a girl started crying, ‘He shot me, he shot me’.” Mr Makiiti was taken to Auckland Hospital where his wounds were dressed. The pellets were expected to remain in the wounds for two weeks. “One of the nurses said it was not a very good way to start a birthday.” A taxi-driver was turning in Karangahape Road when his car was peppered and he suffered pellet wounds in a leg. The police searched a Mount Wellington flat yesterday and recovered weapons and a quantity of literature on weapons. An unemployed Mount Wellington man, aged 19, has been charged with attempted murder.