Her brother’s keeper
Her mentally ill brother was shot dead by police in front of her and her children. But Genevieve Simpson wasn’t going to let the story end there. Determined to find out why the system failed him, she became a mental health worker, writes Tony Wall.
It was lunchtime on a Saturday when Genevieve Simpson’s brother Vaughan Te Moananui arrived at her place in Thames with a dozen beers and a gun.
The .22 rifle was wrapped in a blanket and he wouldn’t say why he had it. He put it under her bed and went and played with her young daughters, helping them paint some rocks.
Simpson tried to hide some of his beers because she knew alcohol was a trigger for his paranoid schizophrenia, and she gave him lunch.
She’d always looked up to 33-year-old Te Moananui, seven years her senior. He’d been her protector, ‘‘the best big brother I could have ever asked for’’.
As kids growing up in Thames, a former goldmining town with its back to the rugged Coromandel Range, they’d go eeling and exploring. Later, he taught her to drive his V8 along the winding coast road.
Te Moananui was big, strong and good at rugby – everyone reckoned he could have been an All Black – and had a reputation as a staunch guy no-one wanted to mess with.
Simpson, who left Thames High School at 15 to work as a hairdresser and at a Chinese restaurant, was proud to point him out as her brother.
But on this day, May 2, 2015, it was clear something was wrong.
Te Moananui became more distressed as the afternoon progressed; through tears he described how he’d shot a friend in the foot the night before when they were firing at bottles.
‘‘The Mongrel Mob is probably after me now, they’re probably gonna kill me,’’ he told his sister. ‘‘I’m not going back to Henry Bennett [mental hospital], I’m not going back to jail.’’
The past decade of his life had been pockmarked with visits to prison and about 15 admissions to the Henry Bennett Centre in Hamilton.
The pattern was usually the same – his paranoia would worsen, exacerbated by alcohol, and he’d arm himself with whatever weapon was handy to protect him from the people he believed were coming to get him.
(He shouldn’t have had a gun that day – he didn’t have a licence, but had traded a dirt bike for the weapon. The supplier was later prosecuted.)
Meanwhile, police had got wind of the previous night’s shooting incident but did not know too many details.
Thirteen members of the armed offenders squad had surrounded Te Moananui’s rented home at Kopu, six kilometres away. Thinking he was inside, they appealed to him with loudhailers.
Back at Simpson’s place, nestled at the foot of a hill a stone’s throw from the Thames CBD, he was telling his sister he wanted police to shoot him.
‘‘He started going back to the time when he was really little and all the memories growing up. It was freaking me out,’’ Simpson says.
‘‘He went through and blessed the house with water . . . and said ‘Today might be my last day here.’
‘‘I’d seen him drunk and unwell, but I’d never seen him in that state before. There was no expression on his face, no colour, he was really pale.
‘‘I didn’t fear for my safety or my kids’. My biggest fear was he would hurt himself.
‘‘He was crying, a big pool of tears. I didn’t know what to do, who to call.’’
Te Moananui, descended from Hauraki chiefs, covered himself in dirt and started doing a haka, calling to his long-dead grandfather, waving the rifle around like a taiaha. A member of an apostolic church, he also spoke in tongues.
He rang his mum, Evelyn Simpson, and his oldest son to tell them he loved them.
Simpson’s partner, David Ormsby, an old school friend of Te Moananui’s, arrived home from playing rugby and tried to reason with him.
But Te Moananui kept asking Ormsby to go and buy him some whiskey, ‘‘so when the police come it won’t hurt’’.
‘‘I just said to him . . . ‘Bro, I’ve already lost enough friends
. . . that have died and that have gone to jail for a long, long time and you know I don’t want . . . anything bad to happen to you as well’,’’ Ormsby told a coroner’s inquest in October.
‘‘He started crying on my shoulder and I started crying on his and yeah, that moment, man
– that moment hurt hard out.’’
Te Moananui was becoming more agitated about the whiskey, so to calm him, Simpson told her partner to pretend to go and get some.
They knew the AOS was at Kopu by now; Simpson advised Ormsby to let them know what was going on.
As he drove away, Simpson called 111, telling the operator her brother was waving a gun around, had shot someone the night before and was ‘‘going nuts’’. She urged them to hurry.
‘‘He’s waiting for the police, but he’s got a gun. He says he’s gonna shoot them,’’ Simpson said, according to a transcript of the call.
‘‘He wasn’t going to shoot them,’’ she says now. ‘‘Vaughan was telling me to ring the police for them to come and shoot him.’’
She has ‘‘heaps of guilt’’ about making the call.
‘‘Lots of people have said, ‘Why did you call police?’ And people say . . . ‘If we were there, we could have stopped him’, that sort of thing. I’ve had to deal with that.
‘‘I really didn’t want to make the call, but he was gonna take the phone and ring them himself, so I [did].
‘‘I definitely wish I didn’t, because he was settling down before they turned up. He probably would have . . . went to sleep.’’
Ormsby passed some of the armed offenders squad members on their way to his house and flagged them down.
‘‘[I said] ‘Hey look . . . don’t shoot my mate, you know’,’’ Ormsby told the coroner. ‘‘ ‘He’s just not in the right state of mind’.
‘‘I kept warning them that my
partner and her kids are in the house as well.’’
Arama Ngapo-Lipscombe, the family’s lawyer, says the police response was ‘‘chaotic, they were completely disorganised’’.
Some of the AOS members stayed at Kopu while the rest headed across town to Simpson’s home in Campbell St.
They’d been at the Kopu address for more than three hours – within eight minutes of their arrival at Campbell St, Te Moananui would be shot.
Police say it was a fastmoving scene and they didn’t have time to set up a safe forward point as they had at Kopu, use a negotiator or phone Simpson for more information.
The Independent Police Conduct Authority would later clear the officers, finding they
were justified in shooting as they feared for their lives.
Simpson says some officers set up across the street at a Plunket centre and she could hear them shouting at her brother as he walked down the side of the house to the front lawn.
‘‘Next minute all you can hear is, ‘Put your gun down, put your f...ing gun down’, really loud and aggressive. It escalated him.’’
She says her brother responded: ‘‘Just f...ing shoot me.’’
He never left the property and the officers were at least 20m away, she says. While he may have lifted the gun, she says he didn’t aim it at them.
‘‘Like I said to them, ‘If he wanted to shoot you guys he would have walked out and fired
at you, he had every opportunity’.’’
Simpson, terrified, grabbed her daughters and rushed out the front door – ‘‘into the line of fire’’. They were about half way across the street when they heard shots.
They turned to see Te Moananui falling; he’d been shot twice in the chest by two officers.
He was one of six people shot by police that year, three fatally.
Simpson and her girls wandered around in a daze. She says no-one came to help her – it was 20 minutes before an officer approached and said her brother had died on the way to hospital.
The psychological effects on the family were devastating. Her youngest, now 9, was diagnosed last year with post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia. Her eldest, now 11, has been irritable since the shooting.
Simpson also has PTSD, and heart arrhythmia caused by the stress. She had to give up a role as a volunteer ambulance officer, which she’d enjoyed, and also quit boxing training.
She had to fight to get support, the Waikato District Health Board eventually paying for a child therapist.
About eight months after the shooting, Simpson saw a job advertised online for a mental health support worker with Pathways Health, a nongovernmental organisation. ‘‘I never would have wanted to go into mental health, I had no interest in it,’’ she says. ‘‘But I thought it was a good opportunity to learn more about Vaughan. Pretty much I was going in there just to investigate – just, you know, policies, procedures, medication – why this may have happened, what could have prevented it.
‘‘My big thing was, ‘Who’s to blame for this?’ I went in thinking I’d find . . . someone hasn’t done their job somewhere along the line.
‘‘I got the job and started investigating straight away.’’