The small Waikato township of Marokopa was the focus of continued police searches during the four years Tom Phillips was on the run. He was shot and killed by police and his children recovered on September 8, 2025. New Zealand Herald photograph
Wary support for slain fugitive father Tom Phillips remains in pockets of the remote town of Marokopa, as locals resent what they see as overbearing police tactics during the four-year manhunt, writes Tom Dillane.
Many Marokopa locals harbour more lingering suspicion of police than contempt for Tom Phillips.
These isolated western Waikato residents do not necessarily condone the actions of the man who evaded police for almost four years, camping with his three young children in the bush after a custody dispute until he was finally killed in a shootout with AOS officers on September 8.
But Phillips grew up one of them. There was a parochial loyalty to trust his motivations, if not his methods, to hold onto his kids.
Those “outsider” cops, with their drones, dogs and assault rifles, who arrived abruptly every few months, invaded the quiet lives of these residents without communication or collaboration in the search.
And parts of Marokopa struggled to see why police had to pursue Phillips with such force, yet also sneered at how futile it was.
A frequent response from locals on the street this month was a vague “oh, it’s sad”, assigning as much blame to the systems they feel failed the Phillips family as to the father’s drastic decision to kidnap his kids.
This is despite a Waikato police officer spending a fortnight in hospital after being shot in the head through the window of his patrol car by Phillips with a high-powered rifle.
Phillips’ 12-year-old daughter Jayda watched on, after the pair had robbed farm supply store PGG Wrightson in nearby town Piopio, fleeing on a quadbike at 2.45am.
Police found the family’s campsite with remaining children Maverick, 10, and Ember, 9 just 2km from the spot of the final confrontation near the intersection of Waipuna and Te Anga Rds, after Phillips’ quadbike was stopped by road spikes.
The camp was hidden just a few hundred metres from Te Anga Rd, off a well-beaten track.
The thick foliage and giant tawa trees made it impossible for outsiders to find them.
It’s also hard to find the few dozen permanent residents in Marokopa township on any given day.
During the Herald’s three-day visit, the congregation of mostly retirees, and some tourists, wandered out at the incoming tide to go whitebaiting along the Marokopa River, which stretches from the western Waikato coastline 40km inland.
The only sign of activity was a trail of cars parked on Marokopa Rd winding beside the river into town.
“There’s not much else to do here,” one Northland resident laughed, speaking from the almost empty Marokopa holiday park where they come to every year to fish.
A local woman, Gail, was returning to her car on the riverbank just after 5pm that day.
“I feel sorry for his parents, the grandparents … I’d hate my kids to be in the bush. I mean to me, the systems have let them down long before he went in the bush. Where were they all then?”
The subject of police draws a far more adamant response.
“Oh, they were horrible,” Gail said.
“For us as a community, they didn’t talk to us. The nicest way to say it is they intimidated us up and down the road, just constantly.
“It got to the point where people would come out and just walk straight back into the house and wait ‘til they’re gone.”
She claimed police refused to engage with the community - a strategy she said was counterproductive and unnecessary.
“All they had to do was talk to us, tell us what they wanted from us. If they thought we were hiding them, come and see us. I mean, they’d put drones up over your yard,” Gail said.
“That’s how I felt. If you think I’m hiding him, come in, you can have a look. But nobody talked to us.”
Fellow whitebaiter Sam, was similarly critical of some of the police actions this year. He has been living in the area for the past six months working on a building project.
“They were treating everyone as if they were f***ing guilty, eh. Looking at you like ‘are you f***ing hiding him? Are you?’”
“A lot of the people out here are retirees; there’s not many people out here. They’re either farmers or retirees.”
Local Warren Keegan was also scathing of authorities, but said his anger had “nothing to do with not finding” the family.
“Our community is not very happy with the police anyway. I’ll tell you that.
“It’s just the way we’ve been treated down here. They harassed the shit out of us while they were looking for him. And when they closed the road we had no notification. I’m very disappointed with police, straight up.
“They just drove up and down the road, they never bothered to get out and take a look. They were parking up at your house and they wouldn’t come and speak to you or anything.”
Warren and Sam alleged police stopped a school bus to search it at one stage.
One of the retirees living in the Marokopa township of 30 or so houses was Fred, who was cutting his perfectly manicured lawn on a ride-on mower during our visit.
He said the external police presence over the years didn’t bother him at all, and he shared none of the enduring sympathy for Tom Phillips that existed in pockets of the community.
“He’s lived out here his whole life, and yeah, there’s people who support him, but I think their eyes are shut really, because I don’t think he was a nice person or a good person.
“He might have been in his early years, when he went to school. But to be honest I don’t think he was all there because who would do that? He had problems, obviously.
“And then to blatantly go and shoot a cop. He signed his own death warrant.”
However, Fred was critical of police search tactics over the four-year ordeal.
“He [Tom] never pinched stuff in the village. The cops picked on the village all the time, as if somebody in here was holding on to him. I don’t know why.
“And then when they found his hideout, I thought ‘well, that’s the reason why we never ever seen him in the village’.”
Fred said the small grouping of neighbours in the subdued town lived far too much in each other’s pockets for anyone to successfully hide Phillips, let alone the three children.
One regular visitor to the town said they believed locals “were split down the middle” in their support for Phillips.
Most who spoke to the Herald had, though, begun to temper their sympathy for the fugitive given the ongoing injunction proceedings at the High Court at Wellington.
But many residents were reluctant to outright condemn Phillips for fleeing with his children in December 2021.
“Yeah, I was with him, because my son, who’s over in Aussie, he’s got half custody of his child, but he’s not allowed to see him,” one local woman told the Herald while she was out whitebaiting.
“There’s two sides of the story. There’s her side and there’s his side. He buggered it up for himself, but there’s two sides to that story.”
Support for Phillips in town was “half and half, I suppose” but “there are people in town who are also sick of his name”, the woman said.
She was equally reluctant to pass judgment on Phillips shooting and seriously injuring a Waikato cop.
“I’d like to know how the policeman is doing. There’s no need to do that. But it depends what went down, you never know. We’ll never know.
“There’s a lot of people out there who don’t trust the police.”
Te Anga Rd resident, Weo, lives with his partner barely a kilometre from where Phillips was shot - but said he heard no noise on the evening of his death.
Weo said he has not been visited by police after the shooting, or for that matter, before it.
That’s despite his property being within the 20km section of Te Anga Rd cordoned off by police for five days after Phillips’ death.
“You’ve had policemen out here [in the past], you’ve had helicopters, you’ve even had the armed forces with their secret spy cameras - ‘Oh look here, oh it’s a deer, oh it’s a pig’.
“How the f*** couldn’t they see that [Phillips’ camp]. You’ve got to wonder. I’m a little cynical. Maybe they’re just out here to get oysters.”
Asked for comment on the residents’ feelings towards police, Acting Waikato District Commander Inspector Andrea McBeth stressed the “long, arduous and complex” nature of the Phillips search.
“We recognise the impact this had on Marokopa as a small rural community.
“There is no doubt that, at times, the increased police presence was disruptive, however our primary goal has always been the safe return of the Phillips children. We thank all those who supported us in our efforts.”
One farmer, who Phillips robbed, was unequivocal in his assessment, and shocked there was any support at all left for slain fugitive father.
“He’s horrible. He’s not a good human… he’s spoiled the reputation of this area.”
But nearly all of Marokopa residents’ first thoughts were for Tom Phillips’ parents, who still live on a farm several kilometres from the Marokopa coastline.
Hemi Kete has lived in Marokopa for 70 years and went to school with Tom Phillips’ father, Neville.
“They’re a lovely family. It’s very unfortunate how it turned out.
Kete said he spoke on the phone to Neville Phillips after his son’s death.
“I gave my condolences, my love. We’ve all got family here. Simple as this, I said: ‘Kia ora bro, just wanted to pass on my aroha’. He said, ‘We will catch up one day… I want to see you one day, Hemi.”
Tom Dillane is an Auckland-based journalist covering local government and crime as well as sports investigations. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is a duty editor and senior reporter.
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