KEY POINTS:
The death of Austin Hemmings stirred the heart of our big, sprawling, often godless city.
In a cruel stroke of timing, it brought two cultures together.
There was Mr Hemmings, the successful, middle-class businessman on his way to the Devonport ferry and his wife and children.
On the other side, a Samoan call-centre worker from Mangere in distress.
And Mr Hemmings wouldn't have given it a second thought. He went to help.
"But don't think for a minute that he was foolhardy when he made that decision," said his older brother Grant.
"Austin had learned how to measure risk. He would have assessed the risk in an instant. And then he would have done the right thing."
So many Aucklanders responded to the man who did the right thing. We dreaded from the first reports of the murder that this needless death had claimed someone special.
We felt flattened when it did turn out to be a cherished husband and father of three teenagers.
We all mourned in our own way.
And we looked for answers.
It was perhaps simplest for the believers. Throughout his two-hour Anglican/Baptist funeral service, it became obvious that Mr Hemmings was the modern-day good Samaritan.
The son of former Matamata dairy farmers who handed their solid Christian and family values down through the generations, Mr Hemmings got up every morning at 6 to pray for his family, his friends, workmates and fellow citizens, give his wife and kids a hug, tell them he loved them and go to work.
As his brave children said when they took the microphone yesterday to honour their father that he was an inspirational Dad.
He was an insurance broker - a role not usually associated with sainthood.
Yet, said his old boss at Law Mooney Williamson in Hamilton and Jo Mason, his boss of eight months at NZI, where he was Auckland branch manager, Mr Hemmings was a bit of a saint.
For him it was all about instilling self-belief in his staff, ethics, courage in their convictions and doing the right thing.
His staff and clients loved him for it. And the profits followed. Which made Mr Hemmings even more convinced that strong moral values can work in our capitalist society.
He taught his family to respect everyone, to be inclusive and to forgive.
And so yesterday there were seats set aside for the policeman who is leading the inquiry into his death, the media who showed his bloodied body on the 6pm news and front pages, the woman he saved and her 30 or so Samoan supporters.
But many more of us, in the privacy of our own homes, might see this as another sort of lesson: an example of what happens when you interfere. The moral: Never help anyone. Stay away.
Austin Hemmings would have wanted the exact opposite to be his legacy.
He would hope his example would help us become a community that will be courageous, will get involved, will go to help.
Which, in one way, makes this death not quite so needless.
