Doctors said Hemi Tahuri (seen here with Missy Parata) had a 1 per cent chance of survival. Photo / Supplied
Krishan Dick-Karetai was jailed for nearly seven years last week, after shooting a love rival in the head in a sleepy coastal Otago town.
Missy Parata's nightmare began with an innocuous message on Facebook from a stranger in Invercargill.
It was nothing creepy.
Krishan Ranui Dick-Karetai, 24, knew her brother and said he was impressed by the work she had been doing.
Around the time of the first nationwide Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, Parata and others had used the time to beautify the surrounds of Karitane, where she had lived with her partner Hemi Tahuri since 2019.
They had cleaned up the urupā, created a garden; she was vegan at the time.
"It was really, really healthy," she said.
Dick-Karetai's interest appeared natural too.
He said he was keen to get involved in the environmental projects and eventually he travelled up to meet her.
Parata was initially struck by how confident the man seemed and while there was nothing patently amiss, she was left feeling uneasy.
"I had a feeling ... something was not right. I had that from the beginning," she told the Otago Daily Times.
"I pushed that aside and ignored my gut."
Within months, Dick-Karetai spoke about moving up to Dunedin and his online contact became more overtly flirtatious.
"The messages had kind of gone from smiley faces to love hearts," Parata said.
Parata and Tahuri met as teenagers attending Ashburton College, and their attraction was immediate.
"As soon as I met him I was like 'you're the one'. It was like an instant magnetic draw," she said.
"My house was around the corner from our high school and his house was way over the other side of town and I would walk all the way over there in the morning just to pick him up to walk to school."
At the time of Dick-Karetai's introduction, the couple were on a break, something that had happened occasionally in the past.
Parata said their time apart had resulted in them appreciating one another more and inevitably led to them being reunited, their love renewed.
Whether or not Dick-Karetai knew his window of opportunity was closing, he was prepared to move fast.
Parata described them as "red flags" — incidents involving Dick-Karetai that made her increasingly perturbed.
They were easy to dismiss initially.
Dick-Karetai would openly bad-mouth the mother of his child, despite her seemingly doing a good job raising the boy.
Pivotal in Parata's mind was when she told him that he might struggle to find a rental in Dunedin that allowed him to have his dog.
"Within two weeks he told me that he shot his dog in the head ... He said the dog was sick," she said.
"My whole radar just went off."
Nothing Parata could say would deter Dick-Karetai and in March last year he moved to Dunedin, first living with his grandfather in Sawyers Bay.
As a youth worker, Parata enjoyed helping people — and Dick-Karetai milked that character trait.
The more he leant on her, the more she felt obliged to prop him up.
While court documents said the pair were in a "relationship", that was disputed by Parata.
She told the ODT the time she spent with him and any acquiescence on her part was driven by "safety reasons".
She was driven by the fear of what might happen should she disobey Dick-Karetai.
Looking back, Parata said the manipulation and gaslighting were blindingly obvious but in the midst of it the situation was hazier.
Dick-Karetai would arrive at her workplace unannounced to drop off food.
Parata's colleagues thought it was a sweet gesture, but she knew he was simply keeping tabs on her.
"I didn't want to go and tell people about him and what he's doing to me if it's all in my head. I didn't want to ruin someone's reputation, because he kind of made me feel like it was all my fault," she said.
"He made me feel like everyone around me hated me and I could only rely on him. I started looking at it like that."
Dick-Karetai, who was unemployed for much of his time in Dunedin, would obsessively trawl through Parata's social media accounts and become upset if she was communicating with other men.
On one occasion she interviewed three men who had come from Whangārei to be on her radio show.
Dick-Karetai later told her he had waited outside the station to watch how she interacted with them,
Stalking, Parata said, was not overstating it.
"It was way more than that."
Of course, she wanted to pull away, but there was an ever-looming threat in the background that effectively held her captive.
Dick-Karetai talked openly about his mental health travails and was not subtle in his emotional blackmail.
By August 2021, the situation was becoming dangerously fraught.
Parata was back together with Tahuri but the more she attempted to sideline Dick-Karetai, the more desperately he reacted.
Around that time, she remembered receiving a video from him of him self-harming along with a message threatening to kill himself and leave a note blaming her if she did not comply with his demands.
Dick-Karetai would increasingly show up at Parata's work and at other places she frequented; and his cellphone contact ramped up further.
Bombarded with calls and messages, she shrank — yearning to be free of his grip but still feeling an obligation to help.
When Parata and Tahuri travelled to Ashburton, on the way to Tahuri's grandfather's funeral, it was more than Dick-Karetai could bear.
"I woke up one morning and I had 270 missed calls and messages. I looked at my phone and I was just shaking like s...," Ms Parata said.
She walked out to her car for some space and saw a vehicle down the road with its headlights on.
"I checked my phone and he was ringing. I answered and he said 'I'm in Ashburton right now. I'm looking at a car that looks like yours. I've just seen someone get in it. It's you, isn't it?'
"From that moment I knew."
Dick-Karetai was trespassed from the couple's Coast Rd property after he continued to show up out of the blue.
But he remained undeterred.
Within a month, he had breached the trespass order three times.
Dick-Karetai would lure Parata out of the address, demand she end her relationship with Tahuri and make threats of harm towards the man.
Nothing she said could sway him.
On October 15, Dick-Karetai's rage reached its terrifying zenith.
By 7.20am he had sent Parata 35 abusive messages; by lunchtime, he had called her 33 times.
Exhausted from the continuous attempts to deflect his attention and placate him, she took a day off work.
Dick-Karetai wanted to see her.
Parata first said she was busy at her job — he turned up there and found her absent.
She said she was in an important meeting at Oranga Tamariki — prove it, he ordered.
Parata snapped.
"I was over it. I was totally done. I was so tired. I hadn't slept in months," she said.
Constantly appeasing Dick-Karetai and pandering to his sensibilities had only made the situation direr; it was time for a more direct approach.
"I don't want you!" she messaged. "And I don't want you to ever try and message or call me! You need to leave me alone."
She knew it was only a matter of time before Dick-Karetai came calling so she deliberately reparked her car by a shed so it was not visible from the road.
The incessant calls and messages mounted, as did Parata's sense of dread.
Tahuri was mowing the lawn when she conveyed her fears.
He tried to reassure her that Dick-Karetai was "all talk" but, sensing her growing terror, told her to call the police.
Within seconds, there was the beep of a car horn.
He had arrived.
"My panic was next level," Parata said.
While Tahuri remained out the front of the property trying to talk the man down, she remained out of sight, begging police to come quickly.
After asking for Dick-Karetai's number plate, the call taker advised them to lock the door and remain inside.
The following moments were seared into Parata's memory.
As Tahuri secured the door, she watched Dick-Karetai approach through the glass panels.
"Then all I've seen is this rifle come out of nowhere," she said.
"I froze and it just happened so quickly. Hemi fell back and was in a bit of a fit and his mouth was frothing. My whole body just dropped and I brought his head towards me ... and I could still see him holding the gun up and I was like 'I could die right now but I don't care'. He just smiled and walked away."
In the High Court at Dunedin last week, Justice Rachel Dunningham told Dick-Karetai just how close he had come to a sentence of life imprisonment.
"I consider this is about as close to murder as a charge of attempted murder can be."
If Dick-Karetai was destined to become a deranged stalker, it was not obvious from his youth.
The court heard he was given a special award for Māori studies while at King's High School and later received a scholarship to study at Lincoln College.
He had taught kapa haka, raised money to address teen suicide and been involved in fundraising efforts for mental health issues, Justice Dunningham said.
Maybe it came from earlier in his life when he "shouldered very adult responsibility", looking after siblings while his mother struggled with her health, a report writer opined.
The defendant's grandfather said his grandson was the one the family turned to fix everything.
The judge summarised it, though with a perhaps ill-advised choice of words.
"[Y]ou were clearly not as bullet-proof as everyone believed and your own mental health seems to have been triggered during your relationship with Parata, and you did not seek assistance to deal with this."
He was jailed for six years, 11 months and will be eligible for parole from February 2024.
After the shooting and a brief trip to the police station, Parata rushed to Dunedin Hospital to be at Tahuri's side, still covered in his blood.
The doctors prepared her for the worst.
The bleeding was spreading through his brain and he had a 1 per cent chance of survival, they said.
Tahuri had to be flown to Christchurch but they told Parata there would not be enough room in the chopper for her.
"Make room," she said.
So they did.
Tahuri survived the flight and the new doctors gave the same prognosis.
The next 72 hours would be crucial, they said, and it was almost inevitable he would not survive the head wound.
"I felt like I just left my body," Parata said.
As she tried to process the information, a nurse had a quiet word.
"Miracles happen every single day. Keep your faith, keep hoping," she said.
It was a mantra Parata clung on to — and incredibly, it proved true.
As Tahuri made it through the first three nights, it became clear just how lucky he had been to survive.
The bullet missed major arteries by 1mm and had it exited through the back of his skull it would likely have been fatal.
Tahuri had mesh in the back of his head after a tumour was removed when he was a baby.
The bullet remained nestled against it, and was too dangerous to remove.
Despite the miraculousness of his survival, medical professionals stressed his recovery would be arduous.
There was a chance Tahuri may be blind and in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Once he came out of a coma, though, they found he had only lost the peripheral vision in his right eye and may still walk again.
That was all the incentive Parata needed.
"So I started massaging him every single day, for hours and hours, until I had blisters on my hands," she said.
She charted the process on the video-sharing platform TikTok, throwing herself into Tahuri's recovery.
Learning to walk and talk again had been a painstaking process, but Parata's greatest relief was that her partner was still the same man she knew and loved.
The couple are now living in Christchurch, where Tahuri's rehabilitation will continue.
Despite the ordeal they endured in Karitane, they plan, eventually, to return to their former lives.
It was Tahuri, now able to speak for himself, who had the final word.
"Nothing he's done will ever stop us from living our lives," he said.
"This is our home — he can't get us out."
He spotted the man walking and swerved onto the footpath and hit him.