A man who regularly took photos of illegally parked cars and sent them to the council says a woman “grabbed” him by the neck and knocked him unconscious when he confronted her about her parking.
Stevee Ormsby is charged with assaulting Russell Watts after a dispute over her choice of parking spot turned physical.
She denies assaulting him, but admits pushing him away when he got “in her face”, and alleges he keyed her car.
The matter went to a judge-alone trial in the Tauranga District Court earlier this week, where Watts said Ormsby grabbed his neck “like a claw” when he asked her to move her Toyota Hilux.
Watts, 63, lives near Te Wati Park, in Tauranga’s Maungatapu. On the day of the incident, Ormsby, 32, was on her way to rugby practice and parallel parked with two wheels on the berm, as other cars had done.
In court, she said she’d been unaware of the broken yellow lines.
Watts said people often parked there, near a tight bend, and it was an “accident waiting to happen”.
When he first took photos, Ormsby wasn’t in her car.
He then saw her return and alleges when he asked her to move her car, she attacked him.
He remembered her grabbing his neck but said his memory was hazy after that.
“I was knocked unconscious,” Watts said.
He remembered lying on the ground and Ormsby looking at him, as well as “seeing blood”.
She then returned to her rugby practice, he said.
“I don’t know anyone who would assault somebody and see the extent of those injuries and then go back and play sport,” Watts said.
Police arrived and told him to go to hospital because he had “a huge dent” in his head, he said.
Defence lawyer Tony Rickard-Simms asked if Watts had been on blood thinners.
“No, that’s something the hospital said, that it was lucky I wasn’t on blood thinners or I would have been dead within 20 minutes,” Watts said.
The defence claims Watts came out of his house angry and upset.
Ormsby, in her evidence, said she was running late for rugby practice and, coming from Rotorua, didn’t know the area well. She saw how other cars were parked and decided to follow suit.
As she put on her rugby boots, while in the driver’s seat, she noticed a man coming down the street.
He was yelling and she said the first full sentence she heard was, “Do you think you can f***ing park here?”
As she moved to the front of her Toyota, she alleges Watts was pacing up and down on the passenger side of the car, and she noticed a deep scratch on her vehicle.
She assumed he must be clenching a sharp object in his closed fists.
As he came towards her, she said, “What the hell are you doing?” before shoving him hard in the chest and heading for her driver’s door.
He was “a male” and “bigger than [her]”, and she remembered “being frightened”.
She saw he’d fallen over but was trying to get away as she was “worried about what would happen”.
Ormsby noticed Watts was bleeding after she made a U-turn in her vehicle and drove back, by which time Watts had got to his feet, but hadn’t seen the amount of blood shown in the photographs produced as evidence.
After using a different park entrance to get to rugby practice, she saw police arrive.
Ormsby met them walking across the rugby field and told them about the damage to her car.
She said police were more focused on the alleged assault than hearing the allegations of Watts' confrontation and damage to her vehicle.
Police prosecutor Sergeant Dan Dickison suggested to Ormsby she had keyed her own car after moving it.
“Because that would have been a good opportunity to create an excuse... for assaulting him,” he said.
Ormsby said she hadn’t assaulted Watts, nor damaged her car.
Rickard-Simms put Ormsby’s account to Watts under cross-examination.
He asked Watts if the “business of the car parks” had bothered him for a “long time”.
“It’s been bothering everyone who lives in that street for a long time,” Watts replied.
He confirmed he’d had “a lot” of communications with the Tauranga City Council about people parking illegally on the footpaths and broken yellow lines because it caused danger and inconvenience to residents.
He accepted he was upset about the way Ormsby had parked but said he hadn’t been angry.
Rickard-Simms said Watts wanted to tell Ormsby off, not simply inform her that her parking was dangerous.
“You just went in there angry and ranting,” Rickard-Simms said.
“You got right in her face, and the only thing that she did to you was to push you away from her.
“You scratched her car, right down the side of the car.”
Watts said none of that was true.
Judge Melinda Mason has reserved her decision.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
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