Drive-by shots narrowly miss sleeping child

Police are aghast over the apparently random drive-by firing of shots which blasted through the front door and windows of a house near Napier, narrowly missing a woman and her sleeping school-age grandchild.

The blasts - which smashed two panes in a door, two windows and peppered the front of the house with shotgun pellets - happened at Waiohiki on Monday night. The head of Napier CIB, Detective Senior Sergeant Nick Reid, said no motive was evident, nor any reason for the woman or child to be targeted.

Dressed in her Warriors jersey, the woman described how she was watching a league match on TV when the windows smashed, a metre either side of where she and her granddaughter were.

Scared that someone was outside she "got my moko, crawled across the floor, got into my little car, rolled quietly down the drive with no headlights, and went to my relations," she said. "I stayed there the night."

Meanwhile, others 300m away on the opposite side of State Highway 50 heard what they believed were shots and called the police, who attended but did not at the time find any evidence of a shooting.

It was only after the woman contacted police the next day that the seriousness of the situation was revealed.

Such incidents were not uncommon in the area in the days of cross-town gang rivalry in the 1980s and 1990s, but the woman, who has lived with her grandchild in the house for about 10 years, said: "I'm not gang."

Mr Reid said: "There were innocent people in the house and it's this type of thing that leads to deaths like that when baby Jhia was killed in Whanganui."

Considerable numbers of Black Power members were in the region at the weekend for the 35th birthday of the Hawke's Bay chapter, at Moteo, west of Waiohiki, and police are investigating whether the shooting may have been some attempt to target the group or people close to it. Mr Reid said police were seeking information on any people behaving suspiciously in the area.