A man who died during an arrest at Westshore may have already had a heart attack and was also confined in his small car by his own morbidly obese frame, a jury was told in Napier District Court today.
The possibilities were revealed by Crown and defence counsel in opening addresses at the start of a trial in which four police officers each deny a charge of assaulting 179kg Gregory McPeake, 53, with a weapon as he sat at the wheel of a parked car in a carpark at the beach near Napier just before 1am on March 13, 2015.
Mr McPeake, of New Plymouth, had been wanted since hitting his 76-year-old father in the head with a cosh at the father's home in Prospect Rd, Hastings, about 6.15pm - more than six hours before he was found.
Crown prosecutor Ben Vanderkolk, of Palmerston North, emphasised several times there was "no causal link" between anything any of the accused officers did and the death, which happened at the carpark scene off The Esplanade, and just north of the Westshore Surf Lifesaving Club.
The names of the officers are suppressed from publication pending the outcome of the trial expected to last 2-3 weeks.