Surburban fear after random violence

Police examine the scene. Picture / Martin Sykes

It's everybody's worst nightmare - to be standing on a street when a stranger comes out of nowhere and stabs you. On Monday, it happened to 65-year-old Kevan Newman.

As he stood beside his car on the footpath in Railside Ave, Henderson, an agitated man raced across the street and plunged a long-bladed knife into him.

Newman, a retired bus driver and instructor, died on the way to hospital.

The knife-wielding man, 34, had emerged from Norcross Fishing World, where he had grabbed the knife and attacked owner Robert Norcross, stabbing him in the back, stomach and hand as they struggled. The attacker ran back across Railside Ave and into a volley of police bullets. He continued to advance on police until he was brought down in a tackle by parking warden Pes Fa'aui, a 35-year-old league stalwart of the Glenora club.

The attacks were unprovoked. The "disturbed-looking" man had been hanging around the area all morning; locals believe he was planning a robbery. The fishing shop had air rifles and ammunition on display as well as fishing knives. During the morning, he walked into the Railside Dairy, around the corner in Great North Rd, looked around and walked out again.

"I just saw him from behind - he was tall. He wasn't known around here," says the dairy owner. Other shopkeepers do not recall seeing the man, who lives in Massey, in the area before Monday.

"At least with young [troublemakers] they hang around and the police can come and do something about it," said the owner of the K. L. Cafe. "But this was just random."

Staff at the Ray White Real Estate Agency opposite the fishing shop saw the shocking events unfold. They describe the attacker as tall, skinny and scruffy, with long hair.

He entered the fishing shop just before 1pm and grabbed Norcross from behind in a bearhug, said Norcross' father Charlie.

The shop owner thought it was a friend having him on - until his attacker started stabbing. Norcross grabbed a ladder and swung it to fight off his attacker. They ended up rolling on the ground before Norcross fled.

His young employee had been having lunch at the back of the shop but came out to investigate the commotion and told his boss to get away.

Norcross ran down the road to Pasifika Consulting, blood gushing from a hand wound. He had been stabbed twice in the back and once in the stomach, as well as his hand wound which would require microsurgery to repair tendon damage.

Pasifika staff member Murray Conroy wrapped a tea-towel around the gash and Norcross asked him to find his employee and get him to safety.

Conroy ran back to the fishing shop with no idea if the knifeman was still inside. He surveyed the smashed glass cabinets and toppled displays from the struggle and found the employee on the phone to police.

He grabbed him and they ran through a back exit.

Conroy was worried about the older women in the Salvation Army store next door. He ran to tell them to lock their back door. One of the women was gripping a baseball bat.

By this stage, the knifeman had crossed the road and fatally wounded Kevan Newman.

Conroy and the employee watched from down a driveway as the man crossed back Railside Ave, appeared in their line of sight and walked into a hail of police bullets.

The drama seemed to unfold at high speed and the reality did not sink in until later that night, says Conroy. "You see it on the movies but to see it right in front of your eyes and at your feet ..."

He and the employee stood transfixed for a moment and then stumbled back down the driveway, away from the scene.

Robert Norcross told them to get inside the fishing shop and locked the doors. Conroy was concerned for Norcross, who appeared in shock and would not sit down. Conroy made him a cup of tea and "filled it with sugar".

Five days on, the attacker remains in critical care in Auckland Hospital, and police are no closer to understanding the critical question: Why? They and health authorities will reveal nothing of the man's identity, circumstances or mental state before the incident. This is partly for privacy reasons and partly not to jeopardise a likely court case.

The attacks were consistent with the kind of violence associated with the drug P. There are claims the man had been drinking heavily in preceding weeks. When it emerged he was a voluntary community mental health patient, the usual prejudices about mental illness took over.

Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey said too many mental patients were wandering the streets and he questioned whether they were being properly monitored.

Charlie Norcross linked the incident to the closure of psychiatric hospitals.

"None of us are safe. You could go down the road shopping and anything could happen."

Two days later came another violent incident near Arthur's Pass, when a man known to West Coast mental health services attacked a resident in the small settlement of Bealey with an axe.

Sandy Simpson, clinical director of the Mason Clinic, says the episodes trigger age-old fears about mental illness.

"This is exactly the sort of homicide that scares people the most - a person walks down the street and a crazy man with a knife stabs them. Now we have an axe-wielding maniac in Canterbury. It fits the stereotypes and fears people have."

Those in the field would rather we looked at the facts. Research led by Simpson, published in 2003, suggests the public is more at risk from males aged under 25 than from people using mental health services.

The study of 1500 homicides between 1970 and 2000 found the proportion of homicides committed by the mentally ill had fallen from around 20 per cent at the start of the study period to 6 per cent. The figures scotched the myth that the public was more vulnerable after the closure of psychiatric hospitals and the move to community care.

Deb Christensen, co-ordinator of the Regional Mental Health Consumers' Network, says the focus on community care is unfair on those who use mental health services.

"There's violent crime in our society all the time but there's a much bigger push when a person with mental illness is involved.

"For people who do have a mental illness something like this occurs and the focus becomes 'the consumer shouldn't be living in the community because this is what happens'.

"But you only have to look at the numbers accessing these services and correlate the numbers to violent crime to see that there isn't a relationship there."

The killing of Kev Newman is thought to be the first by a mental health patient in the Waitemata Health Board district since 1999. Police data obtained from Statistics NZ record 19 murders, one manslaughter and six attempted murders in the district (which includes the North Shore and Waitakere) in the five years to June 30.

The Simpson-led study also addressed another myth: that community care raised the risk of being killed by a stranger who loses it in the street. Of 84 murders by strangers between 1988 and 2000, only two were found to be mentally ill.

Mentally well killers were more likely to target strangers and the mentally ill more likely to murder loved ones and family, it found.

A total of 829 residents of Waitakere City and North Shore are enlisted with the Waitemata board's community mental health services. Two years ago, the service was in crisis mode. The 1999 murders of Malcolm Beggs, by his flatmate Lachlan Jones, and ACC worker Janet Pike, by Johnny Manu, crushed morale within a service already stretched to the limits.

In March 2003, crisis workers complained that staff numbers were dangerously low and that bed shortages were forcing them to put patients in police cells.

Staff were reported to be "counting down to the next tragedy".

Insiders say the service has made real progress since. Staff turnover has dropped, vacancies have declined and previously separate services are now integrated.

Even so, service levels throughout Auckland remain well below the Government's "mental health blueprint" target - a service accessed by 3 per cent of the population.

"People are expecting a gold star service with a bronze standard of funding," says Waitemata clinical director Margaret Honeyman. "We would like to have sufficient capacity to work with GPs and the primary sector to improve mental health care at an early stage.

"As it is, we are only funded to provide services for people who are already severely unwell."

The mystery Railside Ave killer had spent 13 years living in the community since his first contact with mental health services. He is understood to have been "stable" for at least five years and is not thought to have a history of violence. The most significant concern appears to have been his ability to care for himself.

Assuming he survives, the attacker's mental state will only be known after a full forensic assessment, says psychiatrist David Codyre.

Although violence can be triggered by beliefs which occur during a severe episode of mental illness, it stems much more commonly from uncontrolled anger in mentally well people.

Waitemata is conducting an inquiry into its contact with the attacker before Monday's incident. It's known that police visited his Massey home at 1am on Sunday after his landlady made a 111 call and told police she felt unsafe.

Police said when they arrived there was nothing to suggest the man was dangerous and the landlady could not remember why she had called them. She did not want him removed from the property.

Police judged it unnecessary to call a mental health crisis team.

Two community mental health nurses visited later on Sunday to assess his condition and decided he needed to be seen by his case manager. The man phoned the case manager on Monday morning and arranged to meet the following day.

Waitemata chief executive Dwayne Crombie says there was no shortage of acute beds if staff had wanted to admit the man on Sunday.

"At this stage I'm happy that we assessed him and appeared to carry out a detailed process. People did seem to do appropriate assessments. There's a lot of conjecture at this stage and it's premature.

"I think we need to be honest with the public," says Crombie. "[Incidents] will always happen.

"There will always be some risk. I think we are getting better at reducing the risk.

"But if you look at who perpetrates significant violence in the community, the mental health group are a very small part of that."

Awaiting the outcome of the inquiry most keenly are Kevan Newman's family. Before his funeral yesterday they issued a statement: "We still have questions to be answered but for now, we ask to grieve in private as we farewell Kevan - partner, father, uncle and good mate.

"We all want to live in a safe community and it will take some time to deal with the circumstance of his death and whether it was preventable."

In the Railside Ave area, it was business as usual within days of the attack.

"If we thought we were at risk we'd all be boarding up our houses like in South Africa," said a staff member at Henderson Lock Services. "This was just a random thing - wrong place, wrong time.

"You never know where or when it could happen."