The man who lit a deadly Wellington hostel fire that killed five people has been found guilty after 17 hours of deliberations.
Gasps and quiet exclamations of “yes” came from the public gallery as the jury’s verdicts were read out in court this morning.
It can also now be revealed that the defendant – Esarona Lologa, who can finally be named today after name suppression lapsed – has a previous conviction for attempted murder more than 15 years ago.
Lologa has been on trial in the High Court at Wellington charged with arson and five counts of murder for killing Mike Wahrlich, Liam Hockings, Peter O’Sullivan, Melvin Parun and Kenneth Barnard on May 16, 2023.
Lologa was calm and did not appear to show any emotion as the verdicts were read out.
When the jury left the room, members of the public gallery stood up in respect.
Meanwhile, another member of the gallery began a slow clap.
Police officers involved in the case shared hugs and rubbed each other’s backs as the case concluded.
Lologa had been living at the Loafers Lodge boarding house on Newtown’s Adelaide Rd for about a week before lighting a fire in an unused wardrobe, starting the fatal inferno.
He had started another fire under a couch in the building earlier in the evening, but that had been discovered and extinguished by other residents before it could get out of control.
The 50-year-old did not dispute lighting the fires, but claimed a defence of insanity at trial, with his lawyers arguing he was suffering a serious psychotic relapse due to his diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia at the time.
He had absconded from a mental health facility just weeks before the fire.
The jury of seven women and four men has spent the last four and a half weeks listening to evidence in the trial, including firsthand accounts from firefighters who tackled the blaze, residents who survived the fire, police who arrested and interviewed the defendant, and psychiatrists who assessed his mental health.
Of the six mental health experts who gave their opinions, just one of them – the defence witness – held the opinion that Lologa was insane at the time of lighting the fires.
Dr Krishna Pillai, for the defence, said he primarily based his opinion on the defendant’s own account of his mental state that night, in which he said voices commanded him to light the fires.
He agreed on cross-examination the objective evidence, including CCTV footage of the man’s actions and behaviours, did not support this opinion.
Meanwhile, other psychiatrists said they did not believe he had a defence of insanity available to him, and that he showed signs of having antisocial personality disorder.
Dr Justin Barry-Walsh said Lologa’s behaviour when he was seriously unwell was more obvious, and that it would have been clear to those around him if he was having a serious relapse.
In cases where a defence of insanity is raised, the onus is on the defence to prove the defendant was labouring under a disease of the mind to such an extent as to make him incapable of understanding the nature and quality of his actions or of understanding the moral wrongness of his actions, in line with commonly accepted standards of right and wrong.
The man’s lawyers in this case accepted he understood the nature and quality of his actions, but said he did not comprehend the wrongness of it because he was so mentally unwell.
In his closing address, Crown prosecutor Grant Burston referred to expert Dr Jeremy Skipworth’s comments that the defendant took “purposeful, coordinated, determined and deliberate actions” when lighting the fires.
Meanwhile, in her closing, defence lawyer Louise Sziranyi said Lologa’s actions that day were “disorganised” and “haphazard”.
The Crown proposed the motive was that Lologa did not like living at Loafers Lodge and burnt it down as a way to get put into different accommodation.
Sziranyi rejected this claim, saying the jury would have to involve themselves in “massive guesswork and speculation” to agree with it.
An order preventing the reporting of the man’s previous attempted murder conviction from the 2000s has also been lifted.
He served a prison sentence for the offending, in which he attacked a youth with a machete.
Today’s verdict came exactly one month after the trial began, and days of jury deliberations. The jury, which shrank to 10 people due to illness and injury, began deliberating on Wednesday morning.
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.