In September 2021, Whittaker was in the Plastics and Burns Unit at Christchurch Hospital for treatment for a serious leg injury suffered in a car crash.
After having his dressing changed under general anaesthetic, he refused to wait for an operations theatre assistant to wheel him back to his room and pushed a laundry trolley back to the ward.
In the room, he stood up in spite of his injury, yelled at the nurse trying to take his blood pressure, and she feared he would punch her. When another nurse arrived, Whittaker went outside to smoke.
Two days later, he was on a video call on his laptop when a nurse went to his room to carry out the required checks. Whittaker turned the computer round to face her and said: “The Crips and the Mongrel Mob say ‘Hi’. They’re watching you.”
“She found his incredibly upsetting,” the police told the court. Whittaker had previously thrown things while she was carrying out nursing duties, and yelled at her when he believed his medication was not on time.
Whittaker regularly flouted the rules about visitor hours. When staff asked a visitor to leave outside visiting hours, Whittaker became agitated and intimidating. The staff member was crying when the ward’s nursing manager came out of her office. “You’ll be the next victim,” Whittaker told her, before swinging his elbow crutch and striking the wall about 60cm away from her.
His family were stopped when they tried to visit him outside hours, but they went in anyway. Whittaker wheeled himself in his wheelchair into the reception area soon after and yelled abuse at a security staffer when one of the family groups dropped food and began cleaning it up. Whittaker demanded that the security guard clean up the mess. The woman guard believed he would assault her.
He leapt out of the wheelchair and confronted an orderly who tried to intervene to de-escalate the situation. Whittaker tried to punch the wall but missed, and then punched a box that was on top of the reception table, sending it flying across the corridor.
Security staff talked Whittaker back into his wheelchair and out to the front door area moments before police arrived.
A few days later, he became angry after a phone call and threw his elbow crutch around the room until it broke.
On October 25, 2021, while he was in custody at the hospital and being supervised by three Corrections officers, he was handcuffed on a long chain and was receiving intravenous medication from a bag on a IV stand.
He began threatening an on-call manager who went to the room to check on the Corrections staff and Whittaker. He threatened to assault the manager, but the officer handcuffed to him pulled him back, and two other officers tried to push him back on the bed.
He yelled abuse but could not push past the officers restraining him, but he did heave the 1.8m IV stand at the manager, hitting him in the chest and causing soreness and bruising.
