Today, a young driver admitted causing a high-speed crash that killed five teenagers. Kurt Bayer reports on a tragedy that should never have happened.
The younger boys looked up to Tyreese Stuart Fleming. He was the undisputed king of the skate-park, Timaru's scooter wizard, the one with the social media followers
Fleming also had his driver's licence. And a car – a faded 1996 Nissan Bluebird sedan, admittedly not the sickest ride in town, but still, it got him around.
That frigid Saturday afternoon, August 7 last year, some of them had been hanging out at Caroline Bay skate park in Timaru, South Canterbury. Others played rugby, some sought warmth and free wi-fi at Burger King. Messages shared, videos cackled over.
Fleming went to Bottle-O Seaview about 6.20pm that day - three days after getting his restricted drivers licence – and bought two boxes of an alcoholic vodka-based drink called Long Whites before driving down to the skate park.
Joining up with him were 15-year-old Javarney Drummond, Niko Hill, 15, Joseff "Joey" McCarthy, 16, Jack "Jacko" Wallace, 16, and Andrew Goodger, 15.
For about 20 minutes, they mucked around and drank Fleming's booze.
Fleming posted a video on Snapchat of him "vortexing" at least two Long Whites, sculling the contents.
There had been talk of a party in Temuka, the pottery town 20km up State Highway 1.
They all piled into his car – all except Goodger who was left standing at its rear.
Fleming got out of the driver's seat, walked around, and opened the boot, letting Goodger get in.
The driver closed the boot and took off.
They headed north, Fleming in breach of his restricted licence by carrying passengers.
At the intersection of Hilton Highway and Meadows Rd, Fleming turned right on to Meadows Rd, past the DB Draught Brewery and Heartland Potato Chips factory.
While they were travelling, Goodger spoke to a friend on the phone.
In the background, a person could be heard telling the driver to speed up.
That industrial area, on the northern fringes of town which soon spreads into quiet, wide country backroads, is popular with young drivers - including boy-racers.
About 6pm that night, a local resident phoned 111 to complain about four cars racing and doing burnouts.
"The last thing I said to the call-taker was, 'If you don't send someone out here, someone will get killed', and 90 minutes later, we had this," said Ray Colvill, 70.
There's no suggestion that Fleming, in his over-crowded and factory-spec Bluebird, was a boy-racer but there is little doubt that he was going at speed along Meadows Rd when he came to the Seadown Rd intersection.
Police calculate he was doing between 110 and 115 kilometres per hour when he approached the give way sign.
He never quite made the turn. He lost control and veered onto the grass verge.
The overloading of the car, and with the weight imbalance of a passenger in the boot, impacted on his ability control the car and hit a large concrete power pole at between 107 and 115 kilometres per hour.
In an instant, it was over.
The impact sliced the car in half. The two crumpled chunks would be found approximately 26m apart.
Fleming was trapped in the driver's seat, the engine still running. Brake lights shone red in the dark.
A member of the public came across the crash and stopped, not fully aware of the horrors that lay there.
Talking to 111, they flagged down Melissa Bryce, a 34-year-old single mother-of-three, who was driving from her nearby home into Timaru for a night out with friends as a sober driver.
Bryce, a property manager trained in first aid, pulled over and rushed to see what she could do.
In the dark, with no streetlights, it was hard to establish just what had happened.
The first thing she saw was the rear half of the car.
She saw two people in the back. She called out, asking if anyone could hear her. Nobody responded.
"Just by looking at the scene you could tell they hadn't survived," Bryce says.
But from somewhere in the darkness behind her, a voice said: "How the f*** did I survive this?"
"That's when I realised there was a survivor," Bryce says.
She went back to her car to grab her phone, wanting to use it as a torch.
After turning it on the scene, she saw the front part of the car.
The driver was still in the vehicle. She's unsure if he had a seatbelt on.
She went up to him and introduced herself and asked if he realised what had happened.
Bryce asked the driver, who was clutching his cellphone, to turn off the car's ignition.
"He was in shock, you could tell," Bryce says.
"He was able to tell me that, yes, he had been in an accident and then kept saying, 'How did I survive?'"
She asked if he was in pain. He replied that his side was hurting and she made sure he stayed still.
Seeing the phone, she asked Fleming if there was anyone he wanted her to contact – and he replied, his mother.
"I didn't sugarcoat it, Bryce said. "I told her that [her son] had been in an accident and that she should safely make her way to the site."
He passed the phone to Fleming. He told his mum he had "f***** up".
Police and firefighters turned up within minutes, followed by Fleming's distraught mother.
It was a nightmarish scene. And confused. It took rescuers a while to find one of the teenagers in the boot.
At 7.55pm, police released a short statement, which said they were attending a serious crash which "involved two vehicles".
An hour later, Aoraki Area Commander Inspector Dave Gaskin confirmed "a number of people have lost their lives" and that just one car was involved. And even at that stage, said: "Early indications are that speed was a factor in the crash."
Fleming was taken to hospital. The others never stood a chance.
The court heard today that they were killed instantly.
A blood sample taken from Fleming at hospital one hour and 43 minutes after the crash returned a result of 50±2 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.
The car, broken in two pieces, was trucked off to a salvage yard to be secured, to be examined later by serious crash investigators and Vehicle Testing New Zealand (VTNZ).
The following day, Fleming posted on social media from his hospital bed: "Hello everyone just wanted to say I'm not dead I am very, very lucky to still be alive and I can't believe what has happened and I am so, so, so sorry to the families I have put in pain coz of stupid mistakes that I have made that has costed 5 lives."
The crash devastated the Timaru community.
Shockwaves rippled through the boys' schools: Catholic college Roncalli, Timaru Boys' High School, Mountainview High, and Aoraki Alternative Education.
Two days later, panel beater Stephen Drummond told the Herald that he should be painting Javarney's car but instead he's painting his coffin.
"It's heart-wrenching," he said. "A huge piece of my life has gone, just for a stupid accident, something that was obviously a game for the kids, or to the driver, and it's over."
The day after the tragedy, one of Javarney's mates turned up. He was devastated, thinking he had lost one friend. When he found out, he'd lost five mates, he burst into tears.
"It's gutting ... It just goes round and round and round," Drummond said.
"My heart go out to the families. I'm gutted for them as much as I am for my own family."
He had to go to the hospital to identify his child.
"I just wished it wasn't my boy," Drummond said.
"No parent should have to bury their kid."
Nothing, for Drummond and four other Timaru families, will ever quite feel normal again.
Andrew Goodger's mother Andrea spoke outside court today about the relief in hearing just what happened that night for the first time.
As soon as she heard one of the boys had been travelling in the boot, she knew it would have been her son.
"He was unstoppable – nothing would stop him," he said.
Today she remembered Goodger as a "fun, bubbly" son who loved friends, fishing, and guitar – a "real happy go-lucky boy".
Although she believes the crash was an accident, she was glad that Fleming pleaded guilty.
"He's got to pay for what he's done."
Drummond agrees.
"At the end of the day, if you drink alcohol and put your keys in the ignition and drive, then why should someone feel sorry for him when he's taken your kid's life? There's two sides of it. It sucks to be in my situation."
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