Lachie Jones inquest: Mum’s former friend gives evidence
A former friend of Lachlan Jones’ mother says their friendship stopped shortly after the Gore toddler died because the mother kept telling different stories about his death.
“I cut friendship from her after about two to three weeks after [the] little man’s passing because of her lies ... and all the emotional bullshit that was going on,” Kimberley Rogers said on Tuesday afternoon.
Rogers was giving evidence via audiovisual link from Australia to a coronial inquest being held at the Invercargill courthouse.
Three-year-old Lachie was found dead late on the evening of January 29, 2019, face up in a council oxidation pond near his home.
On Tuesday, Rogers discussed the 17-year friendship she had with Michelle Officer, the boy’s mother.
They had been pregnant together and their children had grown up together, Rogers said.
In response to questioning from Officer’s lawyer, Beatrix Woodhouse, Rogers said she’d had no contact with Officer since not long after Lachie died.
Rogers first learnt of his death from someone at her work, and when she visited Officer’s house the next morning, there were a lot of people there she didn’t know, she said.
Officer did not contact her about funeral details, and Rogers said the only time she saw Officer cry was at the funeral.
“I don’t know how it is – [I] have not lost a child – but I never saw any tears except when they were lowering the coffin into the ground,” she said. “There was nothing from her to suggest she was grieving.”
Rogers said that when she visited Officer after the death, Officer told her she had been hanging out washing on the night Lachie died and he ran away.
On another occasion, Officer told her she had seen someone in a hi-vis vest on the street through a window from her son Jonathan’s room. This was not physically possible, Rogers said.
“Something’s not adding up right, because she’s now telling me a different circumstance.”
In the months before Lachie’s death, Rogers said she noticed his personality and behaviour had changed and he had become withdrawn.
She wondered whether his reluctance to get into his car seat was because he didn’t want to go home.
Rogers had watched Officer putting him in his car seat and it had been “quite distressing” because Lachie was so strong, she said.
Max Simpkins, a lawyer acting for Lachie’s father, Paul Jones, put it to Officer during his cross-examination during the first week of the inquest that she had been best friends with Rogers for 17 years.
“She’s not my best friend at all. That's not my best friend,” Officer said.
Ranger saw people in paddock next to pond
Also on Tuesday, a man who worked as a dog ranger at the time Lachie died gave evidence that he saw three people in a paddock next to the council wastewater ponds on the afternoon of the death – and one was wearing a hi-vis vest.
David McKewen said he was picking up a dog from the pound, which was at the Gore District Council’s wastewater treatment plant, about 3.30pm to 3.35pm.
He saw three people in the paddock near a fence about 200 metres to 300m away, for about 10 to 15 seconds.
One was young and two were youngish, and there was “communication” going on between them, he said.
“The smallest one did stick out as someone who shouldn’t have been there.”
He said he wrote down a detailed description of what he saw in his diary but had thrown it out when he moved house in2020.
In response to questioning from Simon Mount, KC, one of the counsel assisting Coroner Alexander Ho, McKewen said one of the people was wearing a hi-vis vest.
McKewen said he had discussed what he saw with wastewater plant staff and raised the issue with his senior manager, but it never went any further.
“We were waiting for them [police] to contact us. Someone died and and they didn’t contact people in that work area.”
He said he did not raise it with police himself because he was not allowed to without senior management approval.
McKewen left his council job in 2020 but did not go to police then. As far as he knew, police had concluded Lachie died by drowning and the council was being prosecuted by WorkSafe, he said.
He was never interviewed in relation to that case, he said.
In response to questioning from Woodhouse, McKewen said there used to be “lots of people“around the area of the pond but that changed when the council decided to desludge them.
When a new treatment plant for a milk plant was built, people were unable to get into the area, he said.
The inquest continued yesterday as police associated with the investigation begin giving evidence.