Teens get a taste of village justice

The night of Sunday, September 17 was frosty and moonless in Palliser Bay, remotest south-east Wairarapa.

The tiny fishing settlement of Ngawi slumbered to the familiar percussion of a scything southerly and surf crashing on the black-sand coast. With no more than 40 permanent residents - mostly fishermen - and a handful of weekenders, it's the kind of place where people still leave their doors unlocked at night.

Around 2.30am, a car screeching past her house woke Evelyn Kingi. She was frightened: her husband was in his 80s, and only days ago outsiders had broken into a holiday home, and stolen a local's car. She called a neighbour, then the police.

Some time after daybreak, three police officers from Masterton and Featherston arrested the three teenagers who'd allegedly arrived in the car that woke Kingi: Owen Keith Guthrie and Joshua Alan Diamond, both 19, unemployed and living in Carterton, and a 15-year-old from Masterton, who can't be named because of his age.

In the intervening hours, the suspected burglars and car thieves had been chased by car and on foot, allegedly shot at and rammed in their fleeing car, and then targeted by locals with boulders and rocks on a hillside before police persuaded them to give themselves up.

The prevailing local view is that this was an isolated community justifiably rallying against criminals who would have otherwise got away - the ultimate Neighbourhood Watch. But others feel the thief-catchers went too far, straying into vigilantism, and police are now investigating allegations of assault and other offences.

Ngawi has a frontier-town feel about it. No pub, no petrol station, and the nearest police station, 75km away in Featherston, is unmanned at night.

There's a ruggedness to the landscape, climate and character. When it's stormy, you can barely stand straight, the rain's hard and cold and the sea terrifying.

Lined up in front of the fishing boats parked at the village's entrance are several brightly painted quad-bike-sized bulldozers bearing names such as "Kermit" and "Tinky Winky" - incongruous in this tough place.

In summer, holidaymakers swell the population to 300 or more, and February's "Big 3" fishing contest draws anglers from around the country, but for most of the year the only visitors are the occasional tourists passing through on the way to the seal colony or Palliser lighthouse, where the coastal road peters out 5km away.

Kingi wasn't the only local roused by the teenagers' joyriding on the night of September 17. A local source says another man recognised the teenagers from the burglary and car theft a few days earlier. At that point only two of them were in the car.

Sergeant Kevin Basher of Featherston confirms the main points of what happened next. The resident and another man scrambled to block an intersection with the coastal road out of the village, using vehicles to hand - a bulldozer says the source; a ute, says Basher.

The teenagers breached the blockade, and the source alleges one of the two local men then fired a shotgun at the fleeing car before jumping in the other man's ute to chase the teens.

One pellet hit a rear tyre, another the boot, says the local source. More shots were fired at the teenagers' car, and the resident's ute "nudged" it before overtaking it. The teenagers executed a hand-brake turn and squealed back towards the village, passing a second ute driven by a third resident who'd joined the pursuit.

Kelly Senior, who was down from Carterton with her two young boys in her Ngawi home that weekend, says she heard "screeching and a couple of gunshots" that night.

Basher confirms two utes chased the teenagers and that there is evidence the teenagers' car was shot at, but he refuses to name the residents suspected of shooting.

After being given the slip by the teenagers, the two residents rang their neighbours by cellphone to update them, then enlisted the help of another resident to create another roadblock with a tractor and rope about 12km out of Ngawi where the road narrows to a slippery metal ribbon between the ocean and the towering walls of Whatarangi Bluff.

Somehow, the two teenagers slipped back to the bach where the third had been waiting, hiding the car in a garage. Around this time, three police officers arrived (Basher wasn't one) and started trying to establish what was going on. They'd already identified the car as one stolen from Wellington and involved in a car crash in Carterton that day.

An hour or more went by before residents noticed lights in a bach they knew was unoccupied. When they confronted the intruders, the three teenagers fled out the windows and up the hill, disappearing into the darkness. At daybreak, two or three younger fishermen took chase up the hill.

"It was too steep for me," says local engineer Andrew Sims, whose ute was allegedly stolen by the teens in the earlier burglary and who watched with around 12 other locals who had gathered on the street. Meanwhile, the police made their way a small distance up the hill and tried to direct things from there.

Unknown to everyone, one of the teenagers was hiding in bush a stone's throw away. The other two had kept climbing until they were trapped either side of a ravine with a plateau above. Spotting them, the fishermen climbed above and started pelting them with rocks and rolling boulders to flush them out. One of the teenagers' hands was injured.

"The police tried to calm the situation," Basher says, adding that all the while the teenagers were yelling abuse. According to one local, when one teenager "got lippy", a fisherman "had a fight with him. The other kid also got a bit lippy, and the fisherman said to one of the others 'It's your turn, now you have a go'."

Finally, after around half an hour, the teenagers capitulated and clambered down to the police, and the third one also surrendered. As the two were being led down the gully, handcuffed and swearing at the locals, one was pushed and fell.

Around 6am, police rang Evelyn Kingi and told her the offenders had been caught, she could sleep now.

"I know they got pushed around a bit when coming down the hill, but nothing serious," says retired Ngawi fisherman Ken Townsend. He's talking at the breakfast bar of his house, the fire blazing against the cold of a spring storm outside. "They might have fallen over a few times but that's their fault. They would have got hurt more getting up the hill than what anyone tried to hurt them."

Like the other locals who spoke to Herald on Sunday, Townsend bridles at suggestions they went overboard. "They'd been out here before, trashed one house real bad, stole two vehicles - of course the locals are going to get their backs up. If they'd got a beating it would have served them right. They got what they deserved. If the police hadn't been there, they would have really got thrashed."

Neither of the two locals believed to have originally given chase to the teenagers would agree to an interview for this story.

But Sims, whose Hilux has been recovered from the earlier burglary without its wheels, says, "My wife doesn't even want to drive it again: she feels violated."

Credit cards, CDs and documents were also stolen from the Hilux and the Sims' second car while the couple slept in their bedroom metres away.

One of the baches the teenagers are accused of burgling was left with cupboard doors ripped off, tomato sauce and raw eggs smeared around surfaces. Alcohol and food was missing from some of the baches.

"The justice system, you can see from the crime figures, it's just not working," says Sims. Six or seven years ago when the village was victimised by a spate of burglaries, "we dealt with it in-house, and we were left alone for a few years. Now we'll be left alone once word gets around."

Guthrie knew the village from staying with his grandfather Ken Thiele. Thiele and his wife are distraught at the teenager's alleged crime spree, after they, Guthrie's mother and other family members had tried to set him up with a job and sense of direction. Friends say boredom is a big factor in the teenagers' behaviour.

Last Monday, the two mates disappeared from the Carterton addresses they'd been bailed to. They were caught at Ninety Mile Beach on Thursday night, in another stolen car. Guthrie's facing 18 charges, including seven of burglary, two of theft of vehicles, careless driving, and three of driving while disqualified. Seven of the charges relate to the incidents of September 17. Diamond is facing 13 charges, including five of burglary and two of car theft. Both will face further charges from last week's escapade, with Guthrie next due in court on Tuesday and Diamond on November 22. The 15-year-old is also facing charges in the youth court.

"The kids deserve punishment through the courts," says one Ngawi source. "But [what Ngawi locals did] was way out of order. It wouldn't have taken much for the gun shots to have hurt someone. And there could have been innocent parties in that car."

Vigilante justice cases

A common vigilante approach is the "name and shame" campaign - letter drops, signs and rumour publicising the target's identifying details and alleged criminal history, often with threats and incitements to violence. Others use brute force.

November 2005: Two New Brighton women, one a policeman's wife, distribute hundreds of pamphlets warning a convicted child sex offender is about to move to his sister's house in the Christchurch suburb. Residents attack the house with rocks and make threats against the sister.

May 2005: Blackpool, West Coast, residents run Graham Wootton out of town after discovering he has served a sentence for child molestation. One sign they put up reads "Do us all a favour and kill yourself".

May 2005: Whitby, Wellington, residents hound an intellectually disabled man out of town on the false belief he is a paedophile.

May 2005: Five Dunedin men are jailed for up to five years for beating up men they falsely believed were child sex offenders.

May 2004: Two Southland primary schools identify then-Invercargill resident Mark Russell Stenning as a convicted sex offender.

He and his twin brother, Bruce, also a convicted sex offender, later leave town.

October 2002: Northlander Paul McIntyre shoots Samuel Hati while Hati and his two cousins attempt to steal the farmer's quad bike.

A judge later acquits McIntyre of any charges relating to the shooting.