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A man who regularly took photos of illegally parked cars and sent them to the council says a woman “grabbed” him by the neck and knocked him unconscious when he confronted her about her parking.
Stevee Ormsby is charged with assaulting Russell Watts after a dispute over her choice ofparking spot turned physical.
She denies assaulting him, but admits pushing him away when he got “in her face”, and alleges he keyed her car.
Te Wati Park in Taurangi and broken yellow lines on the tighht bend where Stevee Ormsby parked. Photo / Google Maps
The matter went to a judge-alone trial in the Tauranga District Court earlier this week, where Watts said Ormsby grabbed his neck “like a claw” when he asked her to move her Toyota Hilux.
Watts, 63, lives near Te Wati Park, in Tauranga’s Maungatapu. On the day of the incident, Ormsby, 32, was on her way to rugby practice and parallel parked with two wheels on the berm, as other cars had done.
Stevee Ormsby has been charged with assaulting a man who confronted her about her "illegal" parking on broken yellow lines near Te Wati Park in Maungatapu, Tauranga.
In court, she said she’d been unaware of the broken yellow lines.
Watts said people often parked there, near a tight bend, and it was an “accident waiting to happen”.
When he first took photos, Ormsby wasn’t in her car.
Ormsby, in her evidence, said she was running late for rugby practice and, coming from Rotorua, didn’t know the area well. She saw how other cars were parked and decided to follow suit.
As she put on her rugby boots, while in the driver’s seat, she noticed a man coming down the street.
He was yelling and she said the first full sentence she heard was, “Do you think you can f***ing park here?”
As she moved to the front of her Toyota, she alleges Watts was pacing up and down on the passenger side of the car, and she noticed a deep scratch on her vehicle.
She assumed he must be clenching a sharp object in his closed fists.
As he came towards her, she said, “What the hell are you doing?” before shoving him hard in the chest and heading for her driver’s door.
He was “a male” and “bigger than [her]”, and she remembered “being frightened”.
She saw he’d fallen over but was trying to get away as she was “worried about what would happen”.
Ormsby noticed Watts was bleeding after she made a U-turn in her vehicle and drove back, by which time Watts had got to his feet, but hadn’t seen the amount of blood shown in the photographs produced as evidence.
After using a different park entrance to get to rugby practice, she saw police arrive.
Ormsby met them walking across the rugby field and told them about the damage to her car.
She said police were more focused on the alleged assault than hearing the allegations of Watts' confrontation and damage to her vehicle.
He confirmed he’d had “a lot” of communications with the Tauranga City Council about people parking illegally on the footpaths and broken yellow lines because it caused danger and inconvenience to residents.
He accepted he was upset about the way Ormsby had parked but said he hadn’t been angry.
Rickard-Simms said Watts wanted to tell Ormsby off, not simply inform her that her parking was dangerous.
“You just went in there angry and ranting,” Rickard-Simms said.
“You got right in her face, and the only thing that she did to you was to push you away from her.
“You scratched her car, right down the side of the car.”
HannahBartlettis a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
