Motel families in disbelief
People quite liked Ron, the bald guy with the beard and crutches in number 13. He would sit outside his motel unit drinking coffee, sharing his views on the world.
Kids liked him too. They’d draw his picture and pull his beard – and they loved it when he dyed it rainbow colours.
People were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt about his electronic ankle bracelet – after all, everyone has their secrets. He admitted he’d done jail time – for drugs, he said. He complained about the bracelet though, said it ‘‘enslaved’’ him.
Many of those who got to know Ronald Wayne Jeffries at this Palmerston North motel were ‘‘MSD families’’, placed there by Work and Income because they had nowhere else to go. For some, it was either a motel or their cars.
They are now having to come to terms with the fact that the man they’d befriended wasn’t some harmless old guy with a quirky sense of humour, but a recidivist sex offender.
Jeffries, 65, was released from prison in March 2017 after serving 51⁄2 years for sexual offending against a girl between 12 and 15 years old. He would stupefy her, abuse her, then photograph her.
His sexual offending goes back to the 1970s. He was subject to an extended supervision order, used for the most high-risk offenders.
Stuff has learned the Corrections Department placed him in at least two motels and a hotel in Palmerston North this year. Jeffries has been charged with breaching a condition of his supervision order, which said he must have no contact with children. He is back behind bars while the charge is before the court.
Police said on Tuesday that after concerns were raised by Corrections in July, they began a probe into Jeffries’ contact with children but found no evidence of criminal offending.
Jeffries has been fighting through the courts to have his bracelet removed.
Corrections has launched a review of its use of motels as emergency accommodation for high-risk offenders and hopes to bring the number of offenders down from 19 to zero in the coming weeks.
Residents at the motel are still in shock that the man who liked to talk about spirituality is a rapist.
‘‘We had no inkling,’’ says Jeanette Buckley, who lives at the motel with her two sons.
‘‘I often sat with Ron at his table having a cup of tea with him. He was a really friendly, lovely guy. You’re sitting there with this person who you could never in a million years paint as that sort of person.
‘‘To be put in that situation, not knowing, there’s just no words, it’s just disbelief.’’
Another solo mum, who has five girls and doesn’t want to be named because ‘‘we’re running away’’, says they had no idea about Jeffries’ past but she had her suspicions about him.
‘‘To me it felt like he was being friendly too fast.
‘‘His story was he had the Ministry of Justice wrapped around his finger because he knew so much about sovereignty, he was using that as a diversion.’’
She says it’s not the first time this has happened to her family. A couple of years ago the Ministry of Social Development placed them in a motel in Whanganui.
‘‘They put a guy next door to us who’d just come out of jail for the same thing as Ron . . . I got him moved out straight away.’’
Buckley says while Corrections should never have placed Jeffries in the motel, she also blames MSD and Homes for People, the trust that finds housing for low-income people.
Initially she and some other MSD families were staying at a motel across the road but had to move when a kapa haka competition came to town.
When they arrived at the new motel, Jeffries was already there.
‘‘MSD needs to look at their housing policy,’’ Buckley says.
‘‘We’ve got no say in where we go . . . We get told we have to go to these places, if we decline . . . then they cut our funding for emergency accommodation and that’s disgusting.’’
Cheri Birch, the founder and chief executive of Homes for People, says the organisation does not usually deal with the motel in question but some families were placed there during the last school holidays. It’s not their responsibility to vet people already living at a motel.
‘‘You have to talk to Work and Income or Corrections, they are the ones making these things happen. If I’d known there was a convicted sex offender there then you do something about it.’’
Viv Rickard, MSD’S deputy chief executive of service delivery, says the ministry is urgently reviewing the issues the Jeffries case has raised and working with Corrections to prevent it recurring.