Dead veteran’s home trashed
It’s the house a Maori war veteran died in, but vandals have wiped most memories of him from the place.
The walls and ceiling of late Francis Kereopa’s empty home in Auckland’s Avondale have been covered with racial slurs, graffiti and phallic drawings over the past two months. Wiring and switches have been pulled out and his whiteware is strewn across the garage. The taps and sinks are missing and someone has ripped out the hot water cylinder and tossed it into the backyard.
The Ngapuhi man died of ill heath in 2015 and his house and its maintenance fell into dispute soon after, his stepdaughter Stephanie Stanaway said. Nearly a month after the matter was resolved in court, Kereopa’s legacy was ’’violated’’ at the hands of vandals, she said.
She said she discovered the ‘‘mess’’ in the vacant house on July 19, after one of the neighbours noticed furniture had been dumped on the front lawn. But nothing could have prepared Stanaway for what she found when she visited the property.
‘‘An eerie, scary, horrible feeling came over me as I walked inside [the house].’’
The door was ‘‘wide open’’ and vandals had pushed through it.
The only thing that had not been ‘‘completely wrecked’’ was the bed 74-year-old Kereopa died on.
Stanaway said she could not believe what had happened to the ‘‘generous’’ man’s home, who until his last day had a homeless man living in his shed. She said the home was old and would need to be demolished but what ‘‘shocked’’ her was the fact that someone felt they had the right to go inside an empty house to ‘‘trash it’’ and strip away the basics.
Stanaway said it was a reminder for those who had vacant properties.
‘‘Lock it [the house] up well, and have someone check it regularly.’’
Kereopa served in Vietnam as a member of the New Zealand Army from 1958 until the 1960s. He was a regular at the local RSA and would offer financial support to whoever needed it, she said. Sometimes he did not want people to pay him back.
After his military career ended in the 1960s he became involved in construction and was one of the workers who helped build the Sydney Opera House, where he met Stanaway’s mother.