Family laments search efforts
Asibling of three Waikato children missing for the past five months says she worries police and other authorities are not taking the disappearance seriously.
Father Tom Phillips is suspected of taking the children — Jayda, 8, Maverick, 7, and Ember, 6, — into remote bushland near coastal town Marokopa in early December.
He has only reportedly been seen once since then. The children have not been seen.
Their older half-sister said her worried family members feel the police have spent months dragging their feet without taking serious steps to find the children.
Police insisted they were taking the disappearance “very seriously”.
Their latest appeal for public help to find Phillips said officers had “growing concern” for the children’s welfare.
But the children’s adult sister questions “why is there growing concern now and not right at the beginning” when they went missing.
“It’s been five months, it’s ridiculous,” she said.
The disappearance was the second within months in which Phillips had disappeared “off the grid” with his children.
Police launched a major search for him and his children in September last year when his ute was found on Kiritehere Beach, sparking fears the family could have been washed out to sea.
Emergency service teams and members of the local community and iwi spent 17 days looking for Phillips before he and his children turned up at his parents’ home on September 28.
They had been staying in a tent in dense bush, his family said.
Police charged him with wasting police resources.
However, Phillips then went “off the grid” again in early December.
The young children’s mother and older adult halfsisters posted on Facebook soon after calling for help finding the children, saying they wanted “these poor babies back”.
Phillips later missed his January court appearance where he was due to face the charge of wasting police resources.
Police subsequently issued a warrant for his arrest for failing to show.
Police this week stepped up efforts to find him by appealing on TV show Ten 7 Aotearoa on Thursday for public help tracking him down.
But the children’s oldest sister said the family has had to spearhead every new effort to bring attention to the missing children.
She said recent media reports and the police Ten 7 Aotearoa TV show seemed to only take place after the family started a petition calling on police, Oranga Tamariki and the Ministry of Education to do more.
“We have gone from one extreme to another — a high profile search, reported on daily, to a multiple missing person’s case that people are unaware of.”
She said her family have no idea where the children are or how they are doing.