Stephen Bellingham was a builder and a father of one.

Stephen Bellingham was a builder and a father of one.

A tragic picture is emerging of how a party-pill binge and lack of sleep turned 37-year-old builder Steve Bellingham from a quiet, respectable man looking forward to setting up his own business into a hammer-wielding maniac shot dead by police.

As his shocked family struggled to understand how Mr Bellingham could undergo such a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, police said they were working to provide a clearer picture of why one of their officers opened fire.

The exact details of what occurred remain unclear after conflicting witness reports of the shooting in the Christchurch suburb of Linwood on Wednesday night.

Mr Bellingham had reportedly smashed up a van with a golf club and broken into another vehicle with a hammer before being confronted by an officer and shot twice, including the fatal blow to the chest.

It was also revealed yesterday that Mr Bellingham was carrying a shoulder bag containing a hunting knife in a sheath when he was shot.

The bill to ban BZP, the active ingredient in party pills, passed its first reading in Parliament this month.

It has now been sent to a select committee for public submissions.

The minister in charge of drug policy, Jim Anderton, said there was clear evidence that the risks party pills posed were sufficient to ban them.

Last night, a spokesman for Mr Bellingham's family, John Trischler, said they did not have any real indication of what happened to his nephew.

Mr Bellingham's death has puzzled his friends and family, who remember him as kind, funny, great with kids and a "good Kiwi bloke".

The question is how such a seemingly well-adjusted father, with ambitions of running his own building business, ended up going off the rails and being shot dead.

His family in the Hawkes Bay do not have any answers.

"No one really seems to know what happened," said Mr Trischler. "The family are still trying to come to grips with this, and the circumstances of how it happened."

It appears Mr Bellingham, who was unmarried, had problems that had been eating away at him and came to a head in the days before his death in Stanmore Rd.

He had been taking party pills and not been sleeping for days.

Friends spoke of his becoming irrational. Campbell Smythe, 21, visited him 3 1/2 hours before the shooting and said he wasn't himself.