Neighbour guilty of harassment
A woman’s bizarre explanations for harassing her neighbours have been rejected by a judge.
Napier woman Mary O’Neill has been found guilty of harassing a couple and their two young children after Judge Gordon Matenga found her evidence to be ‘‘self-serving’’ and ‘‘evasive’’.
The four guilty verdicts relate to acts performed by O’Neill in late February last year. Judge Matenga reached the verdicts late last month after a hearing in September last year.
The verdicts are the latest chapter in an 18-month conflict that began when Peter Malcouronne, partner Nicola Spicer and their two young children moved into a house on Shakespeare Rd, next door to O’Neill, 56, and husband Thomas O’Neill, in June 2018.
Relations soured quickly and escalated to court proceedings. Following a two-day hearing in February last year, Malcouronne and O’Neill were issued restraining orders following months of hostility.
O’Neill breached the order within hours of the hearing ending. While walking past Spicer outside their homes O’Neill looked directly at Spicer while letting out a loud ‘‘faux or fake laugh’’ in her direction.
O’Neill’s lawyer, Philip Ross, said she could have burst into spontaneous laughter for any manner of reasons. ‘‘She may have looked up at her home and seen her husband pulling a face,’’ he said.
The judge favoured the evidence of Malcouronne and Spicer, who said they had been looking directly at Spicer when she let out the laugh.
The second incident occurred the next day, when O’Neill posted a comment alongside a link to a Stuff article, ‘‘Napier Neighbours receive restraining orders against each other’’, on her Facebook page. This was in breach of the restraining order, which prevented her from publishing any details of the proceedings ‘‘in any way whatsoever’’.
The third incident occurred three days later when O’Neill made visual recordings of Spicer and the children as they were getting into their parked car. Another neighbour described O’Neill holding her cellphone and tracking Spicer as she moved. O’Neill said she had been waving the cellphone around in a bid to receive coverage, which can be patchy in that area.
Under cross-examination about this event, O’Neill disclosed she had 18 CCTV cameras in her home, three of which captured the street. She told the court she had footage taken on the day in question, and she had disclosed this footage. But neither Ross nor police had been provided with this.
Judge Matenga noted that when O’Neill was questioned further about this incident she became evasive and deflected questions with ‘‘totally irrelevant’’ allegations about inappropriate behaviour by other neighbours.
The judge said: ‘‘I formed the view that Mrs O’Neill’s evidence was selfserving. She was evasive and once pressure was brought to bear in relation to issues which needed to be answered by her, Mrs O’Neill turned to irrelevant facts including her health and the size of her student loan to deflect the questioning’’.
Judge Matenga was satisfied that O’Neill made the recordings, and noted that even by her own admission she had three CCTV cameras that were capable of recording Spicer and the children and this alone was a breach of the orders.