This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
The following article was one of the best-read Premium
articles in 2022. The story originally ran in April.
Three-year-old Lachie Jones disappeared on a summer evening three years ago and was found floating face up in an oxidation pond south of his home in Gore a few hours later. Police decided it was an accidental drowning but his father Paul Jones cannot believe it - and he’s not alone, as Kurt Bayer found out.
The road to the ponds is loose gravel. Lachie is said to have climbed over a locked cyclone gate or adjacent wooden fence and walked or run along the grassy banks beside the two ponds. The vegetation at the time was overgrown, dense with thistles, prickles, along with widespread geese, duck, and sheep defecation. Midges were rife.
A thin strip of rough concrete borders the ponds, which police involved in the reinvestigation told Jones his son could have followed. He's gone past the first pond, police believe, and continued several hundred more metres to the far end of the second pond. That's where he was found later that night.
"There's no logic to it all," Jones says. "If [Lachie] wanted to jump in, he would've jumped in at the first pond. To walk through all that rough terrain, prickles, thistles, stones, sheep s*** everywhere ... It would've been all over his feet."
The day after Lachie's death, Jones and his friends retraced the supposed route and suffered multiple cuts, scrapes, and bites. "And yet he arrived at the funeral home in perfect condition, not one mark on him. As the undertaker said to me, he was perfect. How does that add up?" Jones says.
Read the full story and watch the video below.
