Walking the beat of a frightened Lower Hutt suburb

PATRICK GOWER visits a community trying to carry on as normal despite a heavy police presence.

It is the type of neighbourhood where people go for walks.

So says Rosemary Groves, who has lived for the past nine years in the neighbourhood where Donna Hall and Justice Eddie Durie's baby, Kahurautete, was kidnapped.

"I just can't believe it happened here. This is where people go for walks," she said yesterday.

The joggers and walkers were back on the leafy streets of St Albans Grove - where Kahu Durie, who turned 8 months yesterday, was taken from Ms Hall and her teenage nieces at gunpoint on Saturday - and its environs yesterday.

In the past days an army of police bolstered by 60 recruits from the Police College has descended on the streets of Lower Hutt to investigate both the kidnapping and the murder of Kate Alkema, 36, also on Saturday.

They have visited some of the houses near the scene of the baby's abduction more than three times. The recruits' barely scuffed new black shoes were pounding the pavements, catching the eye of passers-by. They were in the shopping malls handing out flyers. They even unknowingly asked visiting Herald reporters if they knew of anyone who had been near the Hutt River at the time of Ms Alkema's murder.

The Chief Justice, Sian Elias, was also in the area, one of many visitors to the Hall-Durie family home.

Stephanie Lang, 13, and Lucy Hart, 14, were spending the last day of the school holidays in St Albans Grove. The two had been warned by their parents to stick together when out, and Lucy clutched a cellphone.

Directly opposite the scene of the abduction, the Lower Hutt city Childcare and Education Centre was open, but the children were not being told what had unfolded outside the gate at the weekend.

"Of course parents are scared, and the kids would be scared if they knew as well," said one woman who would not be named. "If this happened outside the creche where you sent your kids you would have got a fright as well."

Those in the houses on the no-exit road where Kahu was taken said it was a busy area, used during the week as a carpark by students from the 1800-strong Hutt Valley High School and at the weekends by people using the playing fields at Strand Park.

A pensioner who saw the kidnapping unfold from his front lawn said he at first thought it was some youngsters in a car fooling around with friends on the street.

"Then the oldest girl came running at me yelling, 'What is the area, what is this street?' It was then I knew something was wrong."

The police presence had started to fade by late yesterday, their beats moving further and further away as the net widened in the search for baby Kahu.

Full coverage: Baby Kahu kidnapping

Picture: Kahurautete Durie

Picture: Kahurautete's clothing

Picture: the car being sought by police

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