Answers at last for Christie’s parents
Desire for justice helps pair through often unbearable pain of inquest
For the last t wo weeks Tracey and Brian Marceau have sat in the back of a courtroom listening to details of their daughter’s brutal death described, examined and picked apart.
They shed tears, they got angry, there were times it all became too much and they walked out — but every day they returned, their crusade for justice for Christie stronger than their personal pain.
Christie was killed in her own home in 2011 by Akshay Chand.
He was on bail for an earlier assault on Christie and had been ordered to stay away from her.
Christie’s death broke hearts across New Zealand, but no one has suffered more than her parents and sister Heather.
Tracey and Brian spoke to the Weekend Herald about the inquest, where for the first time they heard the full details of the events leading up to the loss of their youngest daughter.
“Having to listen to that information and a lot of stuff we hadn’t heard before has been quite emotionally distressing,” Tracey said.
“It’s almost sucked the life out of us again. It was quite painful.”
The couple sat in courtroom 5.1 in the Auckland District Court on the rigid public gallery seats for six hours a day, li stening to everyone from police to Chand’s mother analyse Christie’s death.
“You’re sitting there and suddenly you realise some of the things you’d been told weren’t quite as they were,” Brian said.
Tracey added: “We’ve waited a long time for it, so it was good from that point of view.
“I think we do have a better understanding of the events that led up to Christie’s death. We had a fair idea anyway but being told to our faces made things a lot clearer to us.”
November will be the sixth anniversary of Christie’s death, and her family had a long wait for answers. 0800 543 354 or ( 09) 522 2999 0508 828 865 ( 0508 tautoko) free 24/ 7 helpline 0800 111 757 or free text 4202
Since it was announced an inquest would be held, a hearing date was scheduled, then vacated as it was not a long enough time frame, the presiding Coroner retired and the file was transferred to his colleague and lawyers after some of the parties involved sought to have points of law addressed.
For the Marceau family, the wait was agonising.
“It’s almost felt like a David and Goliath situation,” said Brian.
“We had a really, really tight family bond and there was no way we were ever going to stop — but some days it was like; ‘ Are we bashing our heads against a wall?’,” Tracey said.
But they stuck it out, knowing they Picture ( below) / Nick Reed loved her, that everything would be okay.
Minutes earlier Chand had forced his way into the Marceaus’ home, chasing Christie downstairs to a deck where he killed her as she tried to unlock a gate to the driveway and escape. Chand was on bail at the time and facing charges of kidnapping Christie at knife- point, assaulting her with intent to rape and threatening to do grievous bodily harm.
Police opposed bail, repeatedly, and Christie wrote a letter to the court, pleading for Chand to be held in custody. She was terrified of him. And she was right to be. Just 33 days after he was bailed to his mother’s home — within a kilometre of the Marceaus’ — he breached all of his release conditions and killed the girl he had become obsessed with.
In court he had feigned remorse and a willingness to obey — but he deceived everyone.
The whole time, he was planning how he would get to Christie, how he would kill her.
In 2012 Chand was convicted of the first set of charges but found not guilty by reason of insanity on the murder charge.
Over the last two weeks Coroner Katharine Greig held an inquest into Christie’s death in a bid to ascertain where changes can be made to the bail process to prevent anyone else being killed in similar circumstances.
The aim — to find out what went wrong and who could have or should have done more or better to protect Christie from harm. “He took her physically but spiritually she will always be there and she’s a really strong power,” Tracey told the Weekend Herald.
“I think she’s with us all the time and she pushes us forward.
“I just miss her walking into the room . . . it never gets any easier.” Coroner Greig will now consider all of the inquest evidence and has indicated she will make a number of recommendations around the wider bail process.