Ram-raiders hit Paihia gift shop owned by long-serving volunteer fire chief

Rex and Fiona Wilson outside the boarded-up Gold n Gifts, with friend Jackie Lavell sweeping up the last of the broken glass. Photo / Peter de Graaf

A couple who’ve given up countless hours volunteering for a small Northland community are the latest business owners to fall prey to ram-raiders.

At 11.39pm on Sunday, a builder’s ute stolen earlier in the night from Te Ngaere, north of Matauri Bay, was used to ram the security grille protecting Gold n Gifts on Williams Rd in Paihia.

The grille held, but the impact from the back of the ute punched a hole just big enough to climb through, buckled the door frame and collapsed the laminated window.

The shop, which sells jewellery, watches and giftware, is owned by Rex and Fiona Wilson.

They are well-known in Paihia, where Rex Wilson has been a volunteer firefighter for almost 30 years and fire chief for the past seven.

He said a group of men had been seen “scoping out” the shop — seen on security cameras and by other business owners — since the end of March.

On one occasion, they had even been seen testing the strength of the security grille and measuring the door.

As a result, security patrols in the area had been stepped up.

Wilson said an alarm connected to the grille alerted him the moment it was hit. Another alarm was activated when the window broke, and he was able to see two men enter the store on live CCTV.

The grille had done its job well because the ute had only made a hole of about one square metre, forcing the offenders to clamber through.

A stolen ute was used to ram the security grille, punching a hole only just big enough to clamber through.

They then smashed a watch cabinet and stole some high-end watches, then broke down an internal door to a back room, where they smashed another cabinet and took an “armful” of G-Shock watches.

They also smashed a jewellery cabinet, but took bizarrely little of its contents.

On the CCTV footage, one offender could be seen reacting with surprise and disappointment when he saw a cabinet that usually contained top-end jewellery was empty because those items were not left in the store overnight.

Alerted by the alarms, Wilson was heading towards the town centre when he came across the ute used in the raid and another vehicle, which also turned out to be stolen, stopped in the middle of the road.

A group of men appeared to be emptying belongings out of the other car, which they then fled in.

Wilson considered giving chase, but thought better of it as he was on his own and there were at least three offenders.

He picked up the belongings dumped from the other car and headed to the shop to start the long and frustrating process of cleaning up the mess — not quite how he’d planned to spend his birthday.

“I just can’t understand the lack of respect for other people’s stuff, and other people’s livelihoods,” he said.

However, he had been heartened by the response from Paihia residents.

“Everyone’s been amazing. So many people have been ringing up, texting, and offering to help. That’s why we like living in a small community. We like it even more now.”

One of the locals had even dropped off fresh hot cross buns for the clean-up crew.

There was also one happy outcome.

As the Wilsons were cleaning up, a backpacker walked past the shop, commiserated with them, and said her car had been stolen overnight while she was staying in a nearby lodge.

Wilson put two and two together and realised the Nelson woman’s car was the one he’d seen being emptied out on the roadside, so he was at least able to reunite her with her dumped belongings.

“She was really happy to get her stuff back,” he said.

Wilson said police attended on the night and a scene-of-crime officer arrived first thing on Monday to look for forensic evidence.

Security had been boosted until the grille could be replaced.

The raid was captured not just on the store’s cameras, but also on Focus Paihia’s state-of-the-art CCTV system.