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An elderly woman caught inside the siege area spent a night in a dark closet in her house overlooking the home of a police killer.
The woman told the Weekend Herald last night that she had spent hours waiting to be rescued from her home on Hospital Hill.
Her house
is 100m from where Jan Molenaar was holed up with weapons and suspected explosives.
"There's just me and the cat still here," she said. "I've been keeping the lights off, and had hardly any sleep last night.
"I've been in contact with the police trying to get out of here - I've been keeping my stuff ready to go by the door all day."
The semi-retired woman, who would be identified only as Ivy, said she had been hiding in a clothes closet in a bedroom at the opposite end of the house in Guys Hill Rd from large windows overlooking Molenaar's Chaucer Rd home.
"I went the furthest away I could so that if anything blows, I should be safe," she said from her house at about 5.30pm, as she heard booming gunfire from what turned out to be the successful retrieval of the body of slain police officer Len Snee from the front porch of the gunman's house.
She missed a police knock on her door at 11pm on Thursday, when her neighbours were taken to safety.
Her husband, who had been out of town that day, stayed in a motel on Thursday night. Although she had taken phone calls from friends and relatives, the only other sign of life had been a visit yesterday afternoon by a heavily armed policewoman asking to use her lavatory.
However, the officer had other priorities than to move her from the house. "It's not fair that I'm forgotten," she said.
She said she offered the officer a view of Molenaar's house in a gully below, but was told she should go nowhere near the windows.
"I knew not to look out - if anything fiery is over there besides the guns, the windows will go," she said.
Ivy said she and her husband had often met Molenaar walking his dog around Hospital Hill, and found him to be "a very polite person".
"He loves his dog, he is quite macho-looking but is very polite and very nice to us," she said.
"We always wave out or make conversation with him."
The siege was last night disrupting scores of households within a cordon reaching almost 900m from Molenaar's house.
A resident of Jull St said a police officer warned her on Thursday night not to look out of their windows as a van in neighbouring Carnell St had been hit by bullets believed to have been fired more than 500m from Molenaar's rifle. That led to the cordon being extended past Carnell St, to the northern side of Kennedy St, the main road to central Napier.
Carnell St resident Susan Gilmore said her partner was not allowed to return home on Thursday night after visiting friends. Residents were allowed to leave, but not return.
Ms Gilmore, a textile artist whose plans for a Mother's Day sale at her home studio are in disarray, said she had enough basic food items but would probably leave when she ran out of cigarettes.
A neighbour, who did not want to be named, said police were escorting staff of a nearby service station to and from the cordon with basic supplies on request from residents.
"It's pretty eerie, it's so quiet, and looking up at the hill, there's no lights on up there in any of the houses," he said. "It's as if there's been a bloody bomb gone off somewhere and everybody died - it's just strange."
- Alanah May Eriksen
