Toilet stop turns to shooting nightmare

Roy Currie can laugh now, but it wasn't much fun taking a couple of slugs in Raupunga. Picture / Hawke's Bay Today

A hidden sniper with a slug gun shot a man in the chest and the backside as he tried to make a toilet stop in a Hawkes Bay town.

Roy Currie, 66, was heading home to Nuhaka on Saturday when he pulled up next to the toilet block in Raupunga, got out of his car and felt something explode in his chest. He said he was so surprised he couldn't describe what he felt when a slug entered his chest just below his left breast pocket, and lodged itself in his stomach lining.

"I felt a crack. I thought something had exploded in my pocket," Mr Currie said yesterday. With no idea he was in someone's gunsights, he headed for the concrete block building in time to hear another slug hit the open toilet door.

Then he felt the blood from his chest wound - the slug penetrated 60mm but luckily did not reach his intestine - and realised what was going on.

"I realised then I'd been shot, but didn't know what it was - a slug gun or .22 ... or what." Fearing the worst, he made a dive for his car as the shooter fired another shot into his backside.

Mr Currie can laugh about the bruise on his buttock the third shot left, even as he grimaces at the effort it takes to sit upright. But it wasn't so funny at the time.

He saw people standing across the road but no sign of a gun and took off with his wheels spinning and headed for his daughter's home in Wairoa. She took him to report the incident to Wairoa police and he was admitted to Wairoa Hospital and flown to Hawkes Bay Hospital for surgery at midnight. Yesterday he was recovering well.

Police received reports of at least one other car being hit by slug pellets on Saturday and closed part of State Highway 2 as they called in the Armed Offenders Squad. They have spoken to a 13-year-old boy and referred him to Youth Aid.

- NZPA