Pair convicted for body panic

A WOMAN and her ex-partner drove a dead body from their house to a nearby park and phoned an ambulance because they panicked.

The Southport Magistrates Court was told Monique Martin, 32, and former partner of 13 years Nathan Hodge, 34, “freaked out” and did not want to call authorities to the Labrador property as children were there.

Instead, they made a joint decision to put the man, who was Martin’s current partner and father of her child, into a car, drove him to a park and tried to prop him up against a wooden fence.

They drove off and phoned authorities from a payphone.

Early on the morning of December 12, 2017, Martin found her partner lying on his back on a mattress. The man was visiting Martin and their child from Sydney, where he was trying to get clean from drugs.

A panicked, drug-affected Martin woke Hodge and together they showered the man and performed CPR.

The court was told the victim’s lips were “very, very blue” and he was freezing and stiff.

The pair were 100 per cent certain he was dead.

When paramedics found the man in the park he was shirtless, frothing at the mouth and there were flies around his face.

On Thursday, Martin and Hodge pleaded guilty to misconduct with a corpse.

Martin’s solicitor, Jane Bruxner, said her client made the decision to get the body away from the children.

“In hindsight … she would have immediately called an ambulance and then organised for her children to be taken away from the property,” Ms Bruxner said.

Hodge’s defence lawyer Stephen Cavanagh, of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Legal Service, said the situation had been “plaguing him for quite some time. He revisits this … it upsets him.”

Magistrate Mark Howden said their actions were illadvised and unfortunate.

“It doesn’t seem to me that the criminality of what they did can be described as significant because it’s not. The actions were ill-advised and illegal, but did not cause injury to anybody,” he said.

Martin was convicted and not further punished, after spending 14 days in custody. Hodge was fined $400. Convictions were recorded.