Tears as tree-sitting teen protester is arrested
The last protester fighting to save a century-old tree in Auckland was arrested and removed from the site by police yesterday.
A tearful Caleb Azor, 18, was helped down out of the macrocarpa about 11.30am.
A witness said police officers climbed to where the teenager was and spoke to him for some time. “They haven’t forcibly pulled him out — he walked down the ladder himself — but he was crying,” the witness said.
The teen was arrested in relation to trespassing, but released after being given a warning, a police spokesman said.
Azor was the last person stopping the removal of the tree — on the corner of Ash St and Great North Rd, in Avondale — where 117 units linked to developers Ockham and Marutu¯a¯hu iwi are set to be built.
There have been months of protests at the site by residents and protest group Mana Ra¯kau, who earlier backed down, saying the removal of the 120-year-old tree, nicknamed Big Mac, was the only way the apartments could go ahead.
Arborist Zane Wedding, who had been leading the protests, said they had not been in vain.
“I would love to see this tree remain, but we came to realise that it was no longer actually ever going to happen.” Wedding said the protesters were instead focusing on the fight for blanket tree protection across Ta¯maki Makaurau.
Ockham co-founder Mark Todd is backing the call for general urban tree protection policy to be resurrected. But he defended the decision to fell the Avondale tree.
“We’ve got to balance the highdensity apartment zone — two blocks from the train station — and this ageing macrocarpa with a 4m crack down the middle, [is] near the end of its life.”
Plans to remove the tree on Thursday were halted as Azor refused to budge from his lofty perch.
His arrest came after allegations of intimidation by someone who arrived in the early hours yesterday and climbed the ladder to where Azor was sleeping.
An Ockham spokesman confirmed the visitor was a member of staff but said there was no intimidation.
A woman who was sleeping in a van not far from the tree, in support of Azor, told the Weekend Herald she was woken by a phone call from the teen.
“He rang me about 1.30 in the morning and said there was a man there — that he came up from behind him. He sounded worried.”
Ockham spokesman Peter Malcouronne confirmed their site manager went up the ladder and had a brief conversation with Azor.
“Our site manager did climb the ladder with a bag of fruit I gave him to give to Caleb. He wasn’t asleep — we’d been talking to him for two hours prior.
“We did not intimidate him or, as has been alleged on several Facebook forums, take any of his possessions,” Malcouronne said.
“We have a lot of respect for Caleb — he’s a kind and very idealistic young man — and we urged the police not to press charges when he came out of the tree.”
Protests have not delayed construction of the units, which is due to start this month.