Allister Christie of Blenheim who died in a car crash in March 2022 and inset of Kyle Clarke, who was sentenced to prison today on charges linked to the accident. Photo / NZME picture supplied by family
Allister Christie was the epitome of the term “salt of the earth”.
He was kind and fun-loving, hard-working and honest and a big contributor to the local community spirit.
But in March 2022 the 70-year-old died after chasing a man who had stolen his car and crashing into a river flowing through a Marlborough vineyard.
His body wasn’t found until the next day. The other driver Kyle Clarke fled the scene, leaving Christie to die entombed in his submerged car - a fact that’s hard for his family to accept.
“There was the potential for him to have been helped by you, or others, which may have saved his life,” Judge Jo Rielly said while sentencing Clarke to five and a half years behind bars in the Blenheim District Court today.
“The court cannot ignore the significant impact on the family of him being missing, and then knowing that he had been left by another person with no inquiry into his wellbeing.”
Clarke had stolen Christie’s blue S-Class Mercedes the previous day. When Christie saw him driving it he gave chase in another vehicle but after a high-speed pursuit, both men ended up crashing into a culvert.
The 31-year-old, who was most likely under the influence of methamphetamine and on a learner’s licence at the time of the crash, struggled injured out of the stolen Mercedes and fled, not stopping to check on Christie who was still trapped in the car he had been driving.
The court heard how the tragedy had left Christie’s family broken, bewildered, and searching hard to find forgiveness.
They still haven’t opened the letter Clarke wrote them.
“I hope he [Christie] haunts you on every corner you turn and on every decision you make,” *Christie’s stepdaughter Melanie Goulton said in her victim impact statement, read in court on her behalf.
Goulton described how at 6am on the morning of March 14, her mother had arrived suddenly, white as a ghost and accompanied by two police officers with the news Christie was missing.
“Allister was missing, but you [Clarke] knew where he was,” Goulton said.
His brother, Murray Christie, told the court they were raised to respect and value their fellow man.
“To think of him submerged in that cold water, we can only bless his soul and hope he is looking down on us.”
Another brother, Neil Christie, said the fact Allister died without anyone helping was difficult to cope with.
Judge Rielly considered Clarke’s actions as the most serious of their kind.
“The court accepts you suffered significant fright and shock from a significant crash but you were physically capable of carrying out actions that may have saved his life,”
Clarke was found guilty in the Blenheim District Court in May of reckless driving causing death and failing to stop to ascertain injury or death, after he ran from the scene, injured and “choking on his own blood”.
While he had admitted entering Christie’s Blenheim home on March 12, 2022, taking the keys and then the vehicle, he denied charges of reckless driving causing death, dangerous driving causing death (in the alternative) and failing to stop to ascertain injury or death.
Judge Rielly’s guilty verdict in May marked the end of a five-day trial that examined the minutes leading up to Christie’s death.
“Sadly, the pursuit ended in tragedy,” she said, while acknowledging Christie’s driving had also been reckless, and in a manner that contributed to the crash that led to the loss of his life.
It was a factor in reducing Clarke’s sentence by a slim margin.
The Crown focused its case on whether Clarke’s reckless driving caused Christie’s death.
The defence focused on causative events and the moments leading up to the collision, and whether the cause of Christie’s death was speed, which was “exponentially different in character” to his driving up to that point.
Crown prosecutor Jackson Webber said at sentencing that it was a chase - not a race, but prolonged, persistent bad driving, and it now seemed clear that Clarke was affected by methamphetamine at the time.
The results had done “terrible, incalculable harm to the Christie family”, and that no one will ever know if Christie could have been helped, but it remained a possibility.
“We will never know because Mr Clarke didn’t bother to look. He only thought of himself.
“He didn’t even bother to tell anyone anonymously. The family didn’t know where [Christie] was - he had simply disappeared,” Webber said.
Defence lawyer Tony Bamford said Clarke, who was on ACC-funding counselling for his own traumas, had now spent 30 months since the accident to reflect on his selfish behaviour, driven by a period of self-destruction and daily meth use.
“He will live with this for the rest of his life,” Bamford said.
Webber said that Clarke entered the Christies’ Blenheim home about 8am on March 12 through a side door which Allister had left ajar for the family dog while he went to work.
Heather was alone, upstairs, and still struggled with knowing he had been in their home.
Clarke took items including a set of car keys to their Mercedes-Benz and then drove off in it.
He was seen by police less than an hour later parked outside a Blenheim address.
The officers recognised Clarke and tried to stop him but he drove off at speed, overtaking vehicles as he fled, so they did not pursue him.
Christie was advised of the incident later that day and was said to have expressed frustration at the police’s decision to abandon the pursuit.
About noon the next day, Christie was driving his silver SsangYong when he saw Clarke driving the Mercedes at a roundabout in Blenheim.
After Clarke realised Christie was the owner of the Mercedes, he took off at speed and a chase ensued through streets. He drove over a highway bridge at close to 130km/h while passing two vehicles and at one stage
suddenly swerved right into a street while travelling at up to 80km/h, into the oncoming lane and over the train tracks.
The way he drove through an intersection caused significant alarm to others on the road, close enough to see Clarke was “trying to get away” from Christie.
One of them was Skye Hale, who told the court she’d been driving home from a nearby dairy when she noticed a car “flying out in front of her”, as she approached the left turn off the highway to the street where she lived.
She said the car was going “very fast” and a second car appeared to be chasing it.
Hale saw Christie, who at one point had given way to her at an intersection, as “upset, angry and hunched over the steering wheel”.
Judge Rielly said she was the last person to see him alive.
Clarke accelerated heavily towards the Ōpaoa River at speeds up to 160km/h. As he approached a stopbank, described as a “blind hump”, he planned an evasive manoeuvre in the hope that Christie would go past and not see him.
Moments later, Christie came over the stopbank at a speed estimated at more than 120km/h. Hale saw his vehicle launched into the air, before it disappeared over the hump and landed on its nose, skidded and struck the rear of the Mercedes, pushing both vehicles into the Ōpaoa River, where they were submerged.
Hale went to check but said at the trial she was puzzled not to have seen anything, perhaps because she had looked one way and not the other.
The impact was so severe that debris was scattered over a wide area. Inexplicably, Christie’s vehicle ended up in front of the Mercedes in the culvert.
His cause of death was inconclusive but, according to a forensic pathologist, it was likely that his injuries from the crash, while not thought to be fatal, might have made it difficult for him to get out of the submerged car.
At about 4pm, Adrian Ferris was out cycling and noticed two vehicles in the river. He initially thought they had been dumped. He took photos and tried to call the police, but could not get through and carried on with his ride.
Ferris’ neighbour was a police officer who, after hearing what Ferris had seen and seeing the photos he’d taken, alerted staff on duty who went and secured the scene.
By then it was getting dark and police could see evidence of what had been a high-speed impact but could not see whether anyone was in either car.
It wasn’t until the next morning that Christie was found in the submerged vehicle. His body was removed that afternoon and his family was notified.
Clarke was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison on the lead charge of reckless driving causing death, three years on the charge of failing to stop to ascertain injury and 18 months for the burglary, to be served at the same time.
He was also disqualified from driving for five years from today.
*The original version incorrectly attributed the quote to Allister Christie’s wife Heather. It was changed on July 16. We apologise to the family for the mistake.
Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.
The vehicle was damaged while later being towed and an $11k claim by the owner followed.