‘I shot her, what have I done?’

High Court hears officer’s testimony of father’s lament after 2-year-old daughter fatally shot in driveway

‘As much as I want to forget it, I can’t,” are the words of a police officer who attended the fatal shooting of a 2-year-old girl last year. In a highly emotional day in the High Court at Auckland several officers gave graphic and harrowing testimony from the day Amokura Daniels-Sanft died.

The toddler was shot in the head on June 2 last year — she’d been playing in the driveway of her family home in South Auckland.

Her father, Gustav Otto Sanft, 26, is charged with her manslaughter.

Senior Constable Jackie Fyfe was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene.

Fyfe had been attending another job when her convoy of police cars was waved down.

As she ran towards the scene she was met by a “pool of blood”, one of the many images officers told the court would stay with them forever.

“I was confronted by [Sanft] holding a small child, he was covered in blood,” she said, recalling the moment she entered the Favona Rd property.

“I asked him to give me the child, he didn’t respond to me, in fact the entire time he was there he was just making a noise . . . a howling noise.”

Fyfe, wiping away tears while seated in the witness stand, said her “job was to check if that child was alive”.

“So I went up to him further. I asked him to ‘give me the child’ but there wasn’t a response so I looked at her, I didn’t know it was a little girl, I looked ...

“She wasn’t moving and she didn’t have half of her head.”

Constable Yutaro Kanai, who had

I asked him to give me the child, he didn’t respond to me, in fact the entire time he was there he was just making a noise . . . a howling noise. Senior Constable Jackie Fyfe

arrived in the same vehicle as Fyfe, yelled at his colleague.

“He just said, ‘get away, get away’,” before he pushed his senior away from the gruesome scene.

Fyfe turned her attention to three children sitting in a nearby car.

“There was a small child, probably about 1, and two other children maybe about 6 or 7, they were young, they were like primary school kids.

“I grabbed the baby, the 1-year-old, and I covered its face with my jacket and I ran back out to the gate.”

She returned again and again to shield the children from the scene.

“There was no way that there was any sign of life,” she said referring to Amokura. “[Sanft] was still holding her, and I turned around and just came to the front of the driveway and just burst into tears.”

She said she apologised to her fellow police officers, “because I was the senior constable and I should’ve been setting an example, but ...

“I just pulled myself together and went to the ambos and just said, ‘get in there’.”

Fyfe said she left the scene and did not return.

Kanai later gave evidence and told the court there were memories he wanted to forget.

“I’ve gone over this, over and over and over again in my head,” he said.

“As much as I want to forget it, I can’t,” he said when asked about the aftermath of the shooting, specifically what Sanft was crying out while “cradling the lifeless body of a child”.

He said Sanft was “wailing and repeating words”.

“In between the crying and the wailing I heard the defendant say ‘I shot her’.

‘“I shot her, what have I done? What have I done?”’ Kanai recalled the father saying.

“‘Amo, Amo what have I done, I’ve f***** up, there’s no coming back from this.’”

However, Constable Kere Taurere later gave evidence saying Sanft cried: “I’ve accidentally shot her.”

“Yes, I’m sure. It is something that I’ll never forget — that incident,” Taurere said when cross-examined.

The trial before a jury and Justice Geoffrey Venning continues.