Fatal car wrecks display upsets widow

Infant Te Hiringa Edwards walks past a van in which nine people died on May 18. Picture / Amos Chapple

A graphic display of cars from fatal crashes - complete with cut-up clothing of the dead - has surprised a Thames widow who was unaware her husband's badly damaged car was on public display.

At the Staying Alive Expo being held at Mystery Creek near Hamilton this week, wrecks from fatal crashes litter a garden of more than 80 white crosses (representing the number of dead on the region's roads this year).

David John MacNamara's car is one of the vehicles on display.

Mr MacNamara, 42, died on July 19 north of the Hautapu dairy factory after his car clipped a truck and careered into an oncoming car.

Next to the public display of Mr MacNamara's car are the shoes, black trousers and singlet he was wearing at the time.

Hamilton Chief Fire Officer Roy Breeze has defended the decision to display items of clothing, but Mrs MacNamara said she was surprised she had not been contacted first.

More sensitivity should have been shown, she said, as she was unaware the car still existed.

"I thought it was going to be destroyed or crushed or whatever."

Her three children had never seen the car in which Mr MacNamara died. If one of them visited Mystery Creek it would have come as a shock. she said.

She agreed "in some ways" with the message being sent to the public through the display.

"It would be a pretty brutal display, but I suppose they'll get their point across."

One wreck shows a slipper next to the back wheel of a four-wheel drive, with empty vodka-mix bottles strewn around the vehicle. Another shows cut-up denim jammed underneath an upturned family wagon.

Mr Breeze said in retrospect it would have been better to have contacted the families.

"Hopefully the families will be pleased that this could save someone."

It was not a conscious decision to use the clothing items, but when the wrecks arrived in their raw form the organisers decided "to run with it", he said.

"The guys were given a job and told to make it look realistic."

Blood had been cleaned from some of the vehicles. "We could have gone 10 times more gruesome."

The display had been moved from its original site - the main public carpark - to a less conspicuous area of Mystery Creek so that people had the choice of whether they wanted to see it.