The man who murdered five people in a boarding house blaze has a violent criminal history and a penchant for fire.
Esarona Lologa, 50, can be named today for the first time after being found guilty on five counts of murder and one count of arson for the deadly Loafers Lodge hostel fire in Wellington.
While the jury in his trial in the High Court at Wellington knew he had 50 previous convictions, including one for serious violent offending, its members did not know he had once been convicted of attempting to murder a teenager.
According to court documents, Lologa had been drinking in October 2009, consuming about 18 cans of Cody’s and Woodstock premixed alcoholic drinks, before the dangerous attack.
The 19-year-old victim had threatened to punch Lologa, thinking he had hurt his mother.
“You walked to your vehicle and collected a sharpened machete. Its blade was around 45cm long,” the judge said in the sentencing decision.
“You attacked the complainant, yelling that you were going to kill him. You attempted to strike him and missed several times. You succeeded in delivering two heavy blows with the machete.”
One of the blows struck the teen’s hand as he tried to shield his head, severing several tendons. The other hit struck the boy’s head, inflicting a deep, 13cm-long wound and fracturing his skull.
The attack ended only when neighbours intervened and disarmed Lologa, who later told police, “I want to kill him. I’m not a dangerous person, but I want to kill him. I’m going to kill him when I come back. I’m not going to jail.”
He also told a detective he was going to kill the victim, but that he ran too fast.
Lologa was 35 at the time. He initially lived in Wellington but was taken to Western Samoa when he was very young.
The judge in his earlier case said he had a “fearful, unhappy childhood” and was beaten by strict family members.
He sentenced Lologa at that time to six years of prison, with a minimum non-parole period of three years.
Parts of Lologa’s violent past were traversed in front of the Loafers jury, including a previous conviction for attempted arson, which happened when he was angry about being kicked out of a hotel.
Lologa had also told psychiatrists it was his job to burn rubbish back in Samoa, and that he enjoyed lighting fires.
The jury also heard extensive evidence about Lologa’s mental health history, including that he’d been hospitalised nine times for relapses in his paranoid schizophrenia.
A key detail in the case was that he had absconded from a mental health facility in Auckland just a few weeks before lighting the fatal fire in Wellington.
During his trial, Crown prosecutor Stephanie Bishop read out the accepted facts relating to Lologa’s clinical history, which painted a grim picture of a man haunted by persecutory delusions and constant fears that people were poisoning or tampering with his food.
Bishop said Lologa had an established diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia that generally remained symptomatic even when he was fully medicated.
His first hospitalisation for his illness was when he was 24 years old, and he was hearing voices swearing at him. He assaulted the person he believed was responsible.
Other brushes with mental health services followed incidents such as throwing rocks through windows and assaulting people he thought were persecuting him.
An assessment after his attempted murder incident found the voices he heard were not influencing his decisions and were not linked to his offending at that time.
In the month before the Loafers Lodge fire, he spent much of his time in hospital. He was admitted in January 2023, having regularly been drinking alcohol and consuming drugs.
Lologa was admitted again in March 2023 and reported hearing ocean waves and “smelling evil on the ward”, Bishop said.
His mental state improved with treatment to the point that he was nearly ready to be discharged. However, he absconded during a period of unescorted leave before that time came.
The fire was lit on May 15 and 16 that year, after he’d been living at Loafers Lodge for about a week.
Some of the psychiatrists gave their opinion that Lologa showed signs of antisocial personality disorder, which is also known as sociopathy, and that some of the behaviours he showed around the time of the fires could be symptoms of his personality rather than his schizophrenia.
Family members of the five fire victims – Mike Wahrlich, Liam Hockings, Peter O’Sullivan, Melvin Parun and Kenneth Barnard –as well as former residents of Loafers Lodge shared hugs and tears after the verdicts were read out today.
Some have sat for five weeks in the public gallery at court, listening to the evidence, including heartbreaking audio of 111 calls from people trapped in the building.
Lologa claimed a defence of insanity at trial, but five out of six forensic psychiatrists gave evidence that they did not think he was insane at the time of the offending.
He told experts he had been overwhelmed by voices commanding him to light the fires, but some experts noted he had never before reported being commanded by voices, and that his behaviour closer to the time of the fires was not severe enough for him to be considered seriously psychotic.
Jury members were asked to consider whether they believed he was not guilty by way of insanity, and if not, whether they thought he fully appreciated that people could have died when he lit the fires.
He will be sentenced in November.
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.