‘He just didn’t deserve this’
The girlfriend of a man killed in the McLaren Falls shooting recalls the day she lost her “kind, generous’ partner
Alana Wingrove is at least grateful the killers didn’t know she was upstairs with her 9-year-old son when they opened fire.
A peppering of shots from a distance is all she heard, as she watched Tyson play Playstation in the second storey living room of her isolated McLaren Falls rental.
It was just after 7pm on February
11, only two months after she had moved into the house on the southwestern outskirts of Tauranga.
As soon as she began to comprehend what was going on, she grabbed Tyson and pushed him to the floor.
“I said to my son, get down on the ground’.
“Basically it was very quick and then I heard a car take off and as they were driving away they were firing in God knows what direction,” the
30-year-old said.
“It’s just lucky me and my son weren’t visible, I guess. I couldn’t see what was going on so I had no idea. All I could think was ‘okay, I need to keep myself and my son safe at that very moment’.”
Her partner of four years, Paul Lasslett, was next door, renovating the house he owned. There was a brief silence before Wingrove heard another man who worked on the property calling out “You need to get down here. I think they’re both dead.”
She rushed down and was confronted with two bodies.
“Obviously I ran to the person I loved and he was still alive at that time. Not that he was responding or anything,” Wingrove said.
“I was scared and concerned. When I went down and saw Paul had been shot I was just beside myself.
“Basically, 111 was already on the phone and I tried to give them details about the wound. They told me the only thing I could do was apply pressure, which I did for 10 minutes.
“Paul was face down on the ground, and he only had a bullet wound in his back, so I was applying pressure to his back. I didn’t want to move him or anything because I didn’t know. That might not help. It might make things worse.
“But I think it went in the front and out the back. So all the blood was coming out the front on to the carpet, not on to the towel I was applying pressure with.”
Despite a nurse arriving from a neighbouring property to assist there was very little that could be done, Wingrove says. “I tried to save him. I did everything I could but there was nothing that anyone could have done.
“He had a heartbeat but he wasn’t there. Like, his eyes were half shut but he wasn’t talking. I tried to talk to him to ask him what I could do to help. He wasn’t there. I know he wasn’t there.”
“I was honestly terrified. I had to make sure my son was safe and okay and I also had to try to stop my boyfriend from dying. So it was really hard.”
Lasslett, 43, and 32-year-old Nick Littlewood were killed at the McLaren Falls property on Ormsby Lane.
A 25-year-old man, Samuel Fane, pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder when he appeared, via audiovisual link from prison, in Tauranga’s High Court on February 26.
Over the course of a week, four people would end up dead, in what was initially speculated to be gang conflict.
Two months on from the trauma of watching her partner die before her eyes, Wingrove is living with her mother in Tauranga and trying to readjust, with the help of counselling.
She says she was questioned by police for around five hours following the murders, but has since been supplied with little information.
It bothers her. “I do sometimes worry if I’m safe, because I don’t know if there are other people involved in this. The police aren’t giving any information out at all.
“All of my friends and family have been really supportive. But they didn’t have to be there, and they didn’t have to go through that. So it’s really hard. I feel very anxious going anywhere, even leaving the house. It’s just something I have to deal with, I guess, in time.”
Her fond memories of Lasslett are bitter comfort.
“He sort of always gave people the benefit of the doubt. Even when my little brother lost his job, he gave him a job on the farm two days a week, just maintaining the grounds and stuff like that,” Wingrove said.
“Things that he didn’t have to do, he did just out of the goodness of his own heart.
“It makes me sick. It really does. I don’t think anyone deserves to die like that, especially someone like Paul. He was always so kind, so generous. He just didn’t deserve this. He was the last person I would ever imagine this would happen to.”