SOS: save our shopkeepers
Sad reminder for daughter of dairy owner killed in 1993
It’s been 21 years since her father was beaten to death — and Ceilla Govind can’t believe shopkeepers are still being killed while they work. In 1993, three 16- and 17-year-olds bashed Navin Govind to death with softball bats. They also beat his 11-year-old son Sanjay, who was in the store at the time.
When Ms Govind, now 39, heard about the stabbing of Arun Kumar in Henderson on Tuesday her thoughts raced back to the night she came home from university and found her father had been attacked.
“That was when my life changed forever,” she said. “It pisses me off. Shouldn’t we learn something from each murder?
“It’s going around in circles. It just feels like Dad was killed . . . and all these other people have been killed, and what has actually changed? Nothing. Nothing has changed.”
The two killings were “kind of the same situation”, she said.
Until she moved to Reporoa recently, Ms Govind had lived in her old family home in West Auckland and worked at the Waitakere council building in Henderson near where Mr Kumar was killed in his Railside Dairy.
“It was like, oh my god, I knew this guy. It was obviously somewhere I used to frequent.
‘‘This dude, who worked really hard, he didn’t expect someone to come in and kill him. It’s really scary.
“It’s crazy. The dudes that killed my dad were 16, 17 years old. It’s like, what goes through your head to make this situation acceptable to you? ‘‘It’s really difficult for me to reconcile these young people with the crimes they commit. It’s really sad. It’s desperate people. I don’t think they know what the consequences were going to be for their actions.”
Running a dairy had become a dangerous occupation, “but it shouldn’t be. When those kids murdered my father, they stole, like, $110 and some cigarettes.
‘‘Is that all my dad’s life was worth? How can you rationalise that?”