Napier shooting: Young flatmates holed up for two days

Kay and Megan Helm with Chris. Photo / Richard Robinson

"Oh my God, there's shots going off right now," Chris Helm shouted down the phone. "There's someone lying out on the street. It might be a policeman."

For two days, 20-year-old Helm had been holed up with his young flatmates in their Carlyle St flat, hiding from a angry gunman with a clear shot at them through the picture window in their living room.

On the phone to the Herald on Sunday, Helm peered through the blinds as his housemates screamed.

"I'm sitting at the bedroom window and I can hear ... oh my god they're shooting again. It's still going, there's at least a dozen shots fired but I don't know where they're coming from. They're bigger than the ones before, it doesn't sound like handguns."

They had been sleeping off the effects of on of the quartet's, Lucy, lively 20th birthday bash, when the first shots rang out at 9.30am on Thursday. The next 48 hours were worse than any hangover they might have imagined.

Police told them to lock themselves in a back bedroom, the door padded with cushions, close the curtains, and stay put.

Watching television and surfing Facebook by candlelight, the friends made a meal from leftover food in the pantry, and smoked their way through their few remaining cigarettes.

It was John Pryor's birthday, too, when a bullet came flying through the window between him and his friend, Ken Cooper.

The neighbours had been celebrating Pryor's 58th birthday at Cooper's house when the shooting started. When they phoned police to tell them what Jan Molenaar was doing the bullets turned on them.

"We could see exactly what he was up to and were telling police, and I am certain he would have been listening in to what we were saying on his police scanner," said Pryor. "Within two minutes of us talking to police he started shooting at us.

"Bullets came shooting through the window between us where we were standing then we heard three thuds as more bullets came."

The pair then fled to Pryor's house directly behind Cooper's. When they got inside, Molenaar fired more shots.

Down the street from Molenaar when the first shots sounded, 67-year-old Loine Honan was hanging out her washing. She thought they were just "kids mucking around".

But her grandson Vince, 16, knew exactly what the cracking noise was: "I'd been shooting before and I could tell it was a really powerful gun. It echoed through the valley."

The sound of a woman's scream left no doubt. He leapt from bed and shouted at his grandmother to get inside.

For two-and-a-half days, the pair lived on rice bubbles, two steaks, crackers, bread and milk.

"It's never been so quiet," Vince said. "I've never heard silence like that in my life." Yesterday afternoon, when police finally confirmed to tired and frightened residents that the siege was over - that Molenaar was dead - most were unashamedly happy.

After a night of mixed messages about whether Molenaar was still alive and dangerous, Chris Helm's first response to the news was to turn up the music.

"It was so bad," said his flatmate Lucy.

"First he's dead, then he isn't, then - 'he's dead'."

Helm's big sister Megan phoned from outside the cordon: "Quick, the cops say we can't come in to you, but you can come out the other way."

Ten minutes later, the four mates were reunited with relieved, smiling parents.