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The family of a South African man jailed for killing his profoundly deaf daughter is promising to fight tooth and nail to stop immigration authorities deporting him once he is paroled from prison.
Garth Abbott - who was sentenced to four years in prison last March for the manslaughter of his 9-year-old daughter Brittany - comes up for parole in the next week. If released, he faces the prospect of being returned to South Africa immediately.
But Abbott's wife Mirese - who also is fighting to remain in New Zealand - has warned Immigration New Zealand it will have a scrap on its hands if it tries to send either of them packing. She has engaged legal counsel and is promising a lengthy and potentially messy fight through the courts to keep Abbott here.
"All my family is very much in support of Garth and we will do whatever to keep him in this country. He is not a criminal or a threat to society," she said. "He just wants to get his old job back and to start making a contribution to society."
Abbott killed his daughter and injured her younger sister Shirvaun, now 7, when he drove off the summit of Mt Wellington into a quarry 100m below in August 2005.
He was charged with murder, with the Crown alleging the act was deliberate, a response to relationship difficulties with Mirese and pressure over the family's immigration status and his children's medical problems.
Abbott has maintained his innocence, blaming the crash on the distraction of an emotional cellphone call.
Before the crash, he was told the family was unlikely to get residency because his daughters - both of whom were deaf - would become a "burden" on the health system.
Soon after he was convicted of killing Brittany, immigration officials went a step further, saying Abbott had no chance of becoming a New Zealand citizen, despite having been in the country since 2003. Deportation proceedings would begin as soon as he completed his sentence, they promised.
Mirese Abbott, 29, told the Herald on Sunday she had spent the past year trying to resolve the family's immigration status. She applied for residency a year ago and - despite meeting the relevant criteria, which included having a fulltime job - she hadn't heard anything from Immigration New Zealand.
She believed the application was being stonewalled because the Government didn't want to pay for her daughter's medical bills.
"This is still an ongoing nightmare. Nothing has been resolved. They are trying to deport my husband, while my daughter and I remain here on work permits," she said. "If they force Garth out, my daughter will have no dad in her life. Is that what they want?"
If it got to the point where her husband was deported, she would fight to remain in New Zealand because returning to Johannesburg would be akin to a death sentence, she claimed.
Immigration New Zealand said privacy constraints stopped it disclosing publicly the immigration status of the Abbotts. It also refused to confirm whether Abbott would be deported once released from prison, saying that "all relevant circumstances will be taken into consideration at such time".
