Neville Capes and Suzanne Brewer were travelling along a quiet rural road late one night in February 1982 when suddenly they saw a car’s headlights right in front of them.
“Shit!”, Capes was heard saying, before the two vehicles crashed into each other, head-on, with such force it ejected the 17-year-old out the back window. He suffered fatal injuries and died in hospital.
Brewer, who was 16 at the time and in the passenger seat, was thrown around inside Capes’ red Ford Escort as it tumbled, bonnet over boot, for about 100m down Otaua Rd, in Waiuku. She was knocked out but survived after being pulled out of the vehicle.
The crash was more than 40 years ago, and Brewer, now a 55-year-old nurse, had moved on with her life.
But then she saw a photo of the driver of the offending car, Peter James Napier, in a copy of the NZ Herald.
Napier, also known as Peter Nepia, was back before the courts after killing another innocent person while behind the wheel.
In June he was jailed for two years and three months on a charge of driving at a dangerous speed and hitting 28-year-old pedestrian Shiqing Li as she tried to cross Boundary Rd in Hamilton on March 30, 2022. The Waikato University student was thrown 24 metres and died in hospital leaving behind a grieving family.
Napier’s lawyer Shayne Lawrey, told sentencing Judge Glen Marshall that the 61-year-old hadn’t driven since the crash, and was “highly likely” to never get behind the wheel again.
“Speaking openly [to me] today, he still has flashbacks to the event and is working personally on that, Sir,” he told Judge Marshall.
Lawrey also said Napier, who now suffered from multiple medical ailments, was someone who had made “drastic changes in his life” since his younger days and had (pleaded guilty) as he had not wanted to put Li’s family through a trial.
But for Brewer, and Capes’ sister, Maxine, that story and image brought back the horrific memories of a night when their lives were forever changed by Napier’s reckless actions.
Norman and Yvonne Capes couldn’t have children so they decided to adopt and Neville, the oldest of three, was their pride and joy.
Maxine told NZME that his brother was just starting his life.
He had an amazing job, a great work ethic, a beautiful girlfriend, and plenty of friends.
He was also the kind of person who would do anything for anybody.
“He was just an absolute angel that’s the only way I can describe him.”
She said Neville was due to take over the family farm, which was on their namesake road, Capes Rd, Pollock, about 20 minutes north of Waiuku.
“Everything was planned out for him and it got taken away just like that.”
She remembered it was 2am when police called the family home with the tragic news; she was 15 and had to answer the phone.
It was news that left their parents devastated and changed all of their lives forever.
“My mother, honestly, a little bit of her died when Nev died.
“It affected her life greatly, it affected our lives, and our mother died at 56 because she was heartbroken because she lost her boy,” she said fighting back tears.
Maxine said the car Neville was driving that night was “his pride and joy”.
“It was a red Escort and he’d just bought it. A couple of days before [the crash] he washed it and made it look nice.”
Napier wasn’t even meant to be driving that night; the then 19-year-old had been disqualified.
But he was so drunk that a tavern proprietor refused to serve him any more alcohol.
He decided to get in his car, an old Vanguard, with his friends and do “wheelies” in the Kentish Tavern car park at Waiuku. Despite objections from his passengers, he carried on driving and eventually crashed into Capes’ Ford Escort.
In the sentencing notes from Justice Sinclair in the High Court at Auckland six months later, he noted that Napier - who was then going by the name Nepia - “had some brushes with the law before”, including for “some fairly serious charges”.
Despite coming from a supportive family, he’d rebelled instead of abiding by their advice.
“This is a shocking offence,” the judge said of the 1982 crash.
“You were obviously very much under the influence of liquor.
“You were denied alcohol by the proprietor of one tavern who had come to the conclusion that you had had more than was good for you to drink, and then you drove off, showing off by doing wheelies around the carpark.”
Then, notwithstanding complaints from his passengers about his driving, Napier drove off and crashed.
“You express remorse now and well you might. But it will not bring this young man back and it will not restore him to his family.”
He was jailed for two years on a charge of vehicular manslaughter.
Maxine Capes now lives in Taranaki and has two children of her own.
The 58-year-old grandmother of four was oblivious to Napier’s latest crime until getting a text from Suzanne Brewer, her brother’s girlfriend at the time of the crash.
The pair have stayed in touch all these years.
“She messaged me and said, ‘Is this the guy?’, and I said, ‘Yeah’.
Maxine, who is a driver for Hirepool, said it was “unbelievable that he’s done it again”.
“It’s just like, ‘you bastard, you brought it all up again’.
“I am absolutely fuming.”
Brewer had seen his image in the paper and was also infuriated.
She still remembers most of the crash.
She said they were going to visit friends just up by the Kentish Tavern and travelling along Otaua Rd when suddenly a set of lights appeared in front of them.
“Me and Neville we were just driving along and we had our lights on, but [Napier] had his lights off, so we didn’t see anything coming and I remember the lights from his car coming into our car and I remember Neville saying ‘shit’.
“I remember the crash, the car rolled, bonnet over boot, the length of a football field.”
The car rolled so far that emergency services thought only one was involved. They couldn’t see Capes’ Escort which had, fortunately for Brewer, landed horizontally across a creek.
She was knocked out for a short time and woke to find herself in the passenger footwell.
“Luckily for me, the car landed like a bridge, across the the creek, if it had landed the other way I would have drowned.”
She remembered there being at least one other passenger in Napier’s car, whom she believed was confined to a wheelchair due to the crash.
“I don’t know how long I was in the car, but there’s a tree there, I’ll never forget the tree because I saw it, and the people that heard the crash, they came down and they didn’t know there was a second car involved because it was actually in the creek.”
Her cousin, who was a firefighter, eventually got her out of the car and into the ambulance. She was fortunate not to be seriously injured.
“I was so lucky,” she said.
Brewer said Capes was so severely injured he died outside Pukekohe Hospital. They managed to revive him, and they transported him to Middlemore Hospital, where he died soon after.
Afterwards, hearing Napier was going to be in court, a group of friends got together and travelled to Auckland only to find out it had been postponed. They then heard he’d reappeared and was jailed for two years.
“They didn’t contact anyone or anything,” Brewer said.
“It’s a bit different from now because no one involved us, we were just left for nothing.
“[Napier] just destroyed so many people’s lives.
She said everyone was just left to carry on back then and she left school because she couldn’t focus.
“There was no follow-up, nothing, but those were the days. We got no counselling, and I probably should have.”
She was shocked to hear Napier was speeding again.
“And now he’s doing those speeds again.
“When I read about that poor girl, that’s a long way to throw a pedestrian. The poor parents.
“My daughter’s a police officer and when I read her father was a police officer and they couldn’t go back to work again, it brought it all back, to how we all felt.”
Brewer said those close to, and related to, Capes, had never had closure.
She is now happy to finally be able to tell people what happened that night.
“I’ve wanted to do this my whole life, tell people what happened, and when I see people have been drinking and driving I always think of this.
“It’s not an if, it’s when you hurt somebody if you get in a car and drink and drive. It’s just something that happens all the time isn’t it.”
As a nurse, she saw the devastation from drink driving crashes firsthand.
“Yeah I’ve seen it, it’s just devastation, it’s just horrible.”
Although it took her “a long, long, long time” to get over the crash, she was now happy with where her life was at.
But she still had one fear from that night; “driving at night. I can’t judge headlights”.
Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for nine years and has been a journalist for 20.
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