Last person reported to see toddler Lachie Jones alive now unsure
A girl who gave a statement to police saying she had seen Lachie Jones on the night he died now says she cannot be sure it was him.
Maxine Cartwright, who lived in the same street as Lachie and his family, told an inquest into the toddler’s death in Invercargill that now she ‘’can’t say with any certainty who it was’’ that she saw on the street hours before the toddler’s body was found.
She told the inquest she had seen two glimpses of a little person in a hi-vis vest on the night in question, one while at her neighbour’s house and again when she was walking home next door.
Lachie’s body was found face up in the Gore District Council’s sewerage ponds, wearing a hi-vis vest, late on the evening of January 29, 2019.
The inquest would determine whether a pathologist who carried out an autopsy was correct to conclude that Lachie died from drowning, the circumstances that led to him being found in the pond, whether other individuals were involved in his death, and whether the circumstances of his death included neglect.
Cartwright gave a statement to police the day after Lachie’s body was found and had been involved in the search for him on the night that he went missing.
Cartwright, who was 14 at the time, initially thought it was a different neighbour’s children she had seen running past the house, she told the inquest.
Cartwright said she had seen Lachie in the neighbourhood in the past but did not know who he or his mother, Michelle Officer, were.
And although she told police the day after Lachie had died that the person she saw on the corner of Grassland Rd was wearing shoes, she said this week she now couldn’t be sure of that.
The police case hinged on Cartwright’s sighting of the 3-year-old, as they believed he had run away from his mother on two separate occasions that night, and after being seen by her on the corner of Grasslands Rd and Salford St, he had gone to the ponds further down the road and accidentally drowned.