‘He tried to kill me and our kids’
Ethan Kerapa was shot dead by police as his two children looked on. Their mother tells her story to national correspondent
Life with the father of her children, Ethan Kerapa, was hell.
Two girls, 4 and 6, watched as their father was gunned down in his Tauranga home on Sunday. The girls’ mother says she received almost daily beatings from Kerapa over nine years, ending in 2017. Kerapa also kidnapped her at knifepoint on her birthday, she says.
Kerapa was killed after a 15-hour standoff at a property in Oriana Cres, in Bellevue, Tauranga, on Sunday afternoon.
Police say they had no option but to shoot him as he was holding children hostage with a machete.
The mother of four – two with Kerapa – breaks down as she details how she found out her ex-partner was shot dead in front of her girls.
But she can’t comfort her daughters from prison.
The woman, who is not being named to protect the identity of her children, found out about the shooting from her cell mate. ‘‘I just finished training and I walked inside my house, I’m in a self-care unit [on prison grounds] and my housemate said: ‘One man shot dead in Tauranga.’
‘‘I said – oh yeah. In Tauranga? And she said, yeah, and I said, bro, where? What’s the address? Because I just straight away, I thought of my girls and, no word of a lie, she said Oriana Crescent, Bellevue, and I just dropped to the ground and I ran to the phone box and I rang my man straight away and I just cried.’’
For now, she has to follow news reports for information. Her partner has spent most of his time in Tauranga
since Sunday trying to find out information about the girls and whether they are safe.
The woman is open about her life, which includes prolific drug use and misdemeanours. She was jailed for three years in March on methamphetamine charges.
The abuse
The woman blames Kerapa for her downward spiral – she said the violence he inflicted on her was prolonged.
During the nine years of abuse, Kerapa went over and above his normal beatings. In 2014, he kidnapped the mother of his children, took her to a secluded spot where he beat her unconscious and left her there.
‘‘He was mentally unstable . . . nine years of constant physical abuse,’’ she said.
‘‘When he kidnapped me where he pretty much beat me and left me out in the middle of nowhere and he drove off. I had no concept of time and I was
bloodied.’’
The abuse at his hands came to an end after a failed attempt to run them over on a busy Hamilton street, after mum and the kids tried to escape on foot. ‘‘I woke up on my birthday to a knife in my face and him saying, get the f... up, bitch,’’ she said.
‘‘He dragged my daughter, who was just a baby, he threw her off the bed and, pretty much I fought him the whole day and I wrestled the knife off him. It was a whole day of hell. I dropped the kids off to my mum’s and it was only my sister there and I said to her, lock the house and if he comes back, call the police.
‘‘I pleaded with him to have my kids taken to my mum and he relented but he waited in the car for me to return because, he threatened me that, if I didn’t come back, he was going to burn down my mum’s house with my kids in it, so I had to go back with him so he wouldn’t hurt the kids.
‘‘From there he said, let’s go out for your birthday, I’m sorry, and I said OK. So we went to the mall for my birthday and that’s when I ran away from him and I jumped in a taxi and I ducked down and I said to the taxi driver, take me to my mum, and he drove me there.
‘‘I grabbed my kids. That’s when he nearly killed us, we were all running down the street and we saw his car and he was catching up with us . . . we had a head start, he ran us down and he was only inches away from killing us.
‘‘I don’t know what happened that day, but I think the car just stopped just inches away from me.
That’s when I decided that once we get away from him that’s it and I kept that promise to my children that mum was never going to go back to him and I’ve always kept them safe. I was just happy to be alive then and that’s when I decided that that was enough for my kids.’’
On Monday, one of Kerapa’s friends said he was a ‘‘good friend and father’’ and was not the antisocial person some neighbours had made him out to be.
Kerapa’s criminal history includes offending in 2007 when he was 27. He was jailed for two years after pleading guilty to 24 charges, including assault with intent to injure, dangerous driving, wilful damage, drink driving, driving while disqualified, assaulting a female and possession of an offensive weapon.
The charges related to three separate incidents when he twice assaulted his partner.
The court heard he’d managed a successful roofing company before becoming addicted to methamphetamine. He had been convicted in 2005 for assaulting a female and contravening protection orders, for which he received a sentence of community work.
The judge said Kerapa had acted like a ‘‘bullying thug’’ and urged him to kick his methamphetamine addiction or further violent offending was inevitable.
Trouble has never been far away for the mother of four.
‘‘I’m not blaming him for me being in here, that’s all on me, but I went through a lot of trauma with him,’’ she said.
‘‘I went through nine years of constant abuse that I couldn’t get out of. I thought I was doing the right thing by my children by staying – I wasn’t.
‘‘Then I started selling drugs to support my family, it was just me and my three kids. I worked but that wasn’t enough to cover anything, I was also doing drugs, and that’s why I’m here because I got caught and I pleaded guilty.’’
She is due before the parole board in May next year and is due for release in 2022.
‘‘I wrote a letter to the judge explaining how I was a victim of abuse and of substance abuse . . . that [abuse by Kerapa] was the cause of it,’’ she said.
‘‘I told the judge I now have a good partner who reached in and pulled me out and pulled me into reality and we have been tight since. He has been my main support and he knows a lot of things that he doesn’t even like to know about what has happened in the past with my kids’ father . . . [and] the erratic behaviour he had.’’
The girls’ mother says she is powerless behind bars. She was powerless to stop her ex from hurting her children on Sunday.