Gangs have easy access to deadly weapons thanks to four decades of weak political leadership
It's not actually the ravages of methamphetamine abuse – the way it rots the addict’s mind and body, and the way it exploits already struggling communities where any kind of high offers a release – that the New Zealand public really cares about. It’s not a part of most people’s lives. It doesn’t really touch most of us. We don’t understand addiction, so we get on with our day and leave the dealers to it. But the methamphetamine trade increasingly demands the use of something which the New Zealand public cares about very much, as a matter of life or death: guns.
Guns and drugs have always gone together. They accessorise each other. And so you’d expect meth dealers and their crime organisations to be fully armed. But the fact they have had such easy access to deadly weapons is thanks to four decades of weak political leadership, strong lobbying by pro-gun groups and enthusiasts and poorly worded legal reform, as well as apathy from police top brass in administering their duties under the Arms Act.
By 2014, one in every five firearms sold in New Zealand was a semi-automatic such as the AR-15, the popular weapon of choice for mass shootings around the world. Frontline police were coming across more and more examples of this heavy firepower. Something was always going to go very, very wrong, and that day arrived in West Auckland on a Friday morning, June 2020, when a maniac armed to the teeth shot and killed a police officer without any warning, any provocation, any reason.
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The June 19, 2020 killing of Constable Matthew Hunt, murdered by Eli Epiha with a semi-automatic Norinco, leads back to organised crime, and to the various failed attempts to maintain gun control.
None of that seemed at stake when Hunt and his policing partner Constable David Goldfinch noticed a black sedan being driven erratically that Friday morning. The driver was approaching an intersection with Triangle Road, one of the busier streets in the West Auckland suburb of Massey, apparently with no intention of stopping. At the very last second before making the lefthand turn, however, he slammed on the brakes, and the Toyota Verossa came to a standstill halfway over the yellow stop line.
Fridays are rubbish days out west, and a rubbish truck was trundling down Triangle Road directly towards the Toyota. Hunt and Goldfinch were parked down the road in a marked police car. They had been tasked with routine traffic duties. Goldfinch was the senior officer, with about eight years’ experience, while Hunt had graduated from Police College a little over two years earlier. The 28-year-old had been working out of the Orewa station but transferred to the Harbour Bridge base just a few weeks prior, with the plan to broaden his experience and make his way into the CIB as a detective.
But first, traffic duty. Pulling over speeding cars, checking driver licences.
That morning was the first time Goldfinch and Hunt had worked together, and it was had been a relatively uneventful shift until they spotted the Toyota Verossa. After the near miss with the rubbish truck, the black sedan pulled onto Triangle Road and headed very slowly in the direction of the police car parked on the other side of the street.
From being in an awful hurry, the driver was now driving painfully slowly. So slowly, in fact, that Goldfinch got a good enough look at the driver’s face to recognise that he didn’t own the car. Running the licence plate FYQ698 through the police computer showed the photograph of a man who was not currently behind the wheel.
The Toyota Verossa crawled past the stationary police vehicle, then turned right onto Reynella Drive about 50 metres behind them. Given how the Toyota had nearly caused a bad accident, the constables agreed that they needed to mspeak with the driver, and so Hunt, who was driving, spun around in a U-turn.
The officers weren’t in any hurry. Sometimes sheepish drivers who know they’ve made a mistake in front of the police just pull over, hoping that the punishment is no more than a slap on the wrist. Because of the way the Verossa had driven past them soooo slowly, Goldfinch and Hunt were half expecting the sedan to be waiting for them on Reynella Drive.
But it was nowhere to be seen. The officers were momentarily confused. The road dips down steeply, out of view; suddenly the officers saw the Verossa flying up the other side of the hill with incredible pace. Hunt flicked on the lights and siren to give chase, but Goldfinch soon realised any pursuit was futile.
"We’re not going to catch this," he told Hunt, and followed official policy to abandon the pursuit because of the danger of speeding through residential streets. Instead, Goldfinch called the registration plate FYQ698 over the police radio to alert colleagues in the area to keep an eye out. Hopefully, they could track down the Verossa later.
They didn’t have to wait long. Thick black smoke hung in the air and debris was scattered all over the road as the police reached the brow of the hill. A little silver car was smashed to bits. Visibility was so poor from the smoke that Hunt had to slow down to a crawl, inching the car forward until they came out the other side of the fumes.
That’s when Goldfinch spotted the Verossa. The speeding car had come to an abrupt halt in a driveway on the other side of the road. Hunt stopped. Goldfinch jumped out. He walked towards the driver’s door of the Verossa. He expected to find the driver slumped over the steering wheel, and was preparing himself to administer CPR until an ambulance arrived.
He took one or two steps before he saw a man walking aggressively towards him. He was holding a firearm which looked like an AK-47. His finger was on the trigger.
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Goldfinch stuck his hands in the air and shouted, "Fucking stop, bro. Put the fucking gun down."
The police officer walked backwards to keep some distance from the gunman. There was about a car-length between them when the gunman pointed the gun at Goldfinch. He never said a word. Then he opened fire.
The first bullet missed. Goldfinch’s training kicked in. He ran around the front of the police car and across the road, to get in behind another car. He had been taught in Police College that only an engine block could stop a bullet of that calibre size.
The gunman kept firing. He walked across the road to the car that Goldfinch was hiding behind, leading to a game of cat-and-mouse. The gunman would lurch to the front of the car, Goldfinch would leap to the back. Back and forth, back and forth, with the gunman trying to get a clear shot.
The stand-off led to a surreal moment where both men just stopped. Goldfinch, who was on the footpath, just put his hands up and said: "Just fucking stop. Just fucking walk away. I won’t arrest you."
He could almost see the cogs whirring in the gunman’s head as he contemplated the offer. It was as if Goldfinch could see the chilling moment when his assailant decided that he would kill him.
Holding the semi-automatic weapon sideways in one hand, the gunman lifted the gun above the roof of the car and started popping off shots at the police officer. Goldfinch saw the muzzle flash and ran. The 5.56 calibre rounds exploded into lawn and concrete driveways, showering Goldfinch in shrapnel across his arms and legs and face. One round struck him in the hip, two in his calf muscle, and a fourth in his foot. The pain was like someone had thrown an acid bomb on his skin.
Goldfinch managed to hobble to a driveway and take shelter behind a fence. He glanced at the back of his leg: it was a mess, blown apart, and his shoe was filling with blood. "I’ve been shot," he blurted over police radio.
While Goldfinch had literally run for his life down Reynella Drive, Constable Matt Hunt had screamed for backup over the radio: "We’re under fire."
Help was on the way, but Hunt couldn’t stand by and watch as the gunman took pot-shots at his partner. Besides, he was a sitting duck inside the vehicle. He was unarmed, but had to do something. Hunt took only a few steps outside the police car before the first bullet caught him, a glancing blow to his left chest. Three more bullets struck Hunt in the back as he turned away from the shooter. The last two shots were fired as the constable was falling or close to the ground.
The first of the dozens of police officers who responded to Constable Hunt’s call for help found him lifeless in the middle of the road. The gunman was nowhere to be seen. It was the first time a police officer had been killed in the line of duty for more than a decade. Constable Len Snee had been fatally shot in May 2009 during another routine callout, which turned into a 50-hour standoff with Jan Molenaar, who was holed up in his Napier home with a cache of illegal weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Constable Hunt’s killer was soon identified as Eli Bob Sauni Epiha, a 27-year-old who once ran with the Crips youth street gang and had recently been released from prison on violence convictions. Epiha went on the run, but was eventually arrested on a rural road north of Auckland. Police found the murder weapon hidden in the bush on the side of State Highway 16: it was a Chinese military knock-off of the AK-47 called a Norinco NHM‑90.
How did such a dangerous and illegal firearm end up in the wrong hands?
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the explosive new book Gangster's Paradise by New Zealand's best crime reporter Jared Savage (HarperCollins, $35), available in bookstores nationwide.
