NZ News
Tom Phillips shot officer in head with a rifle during deadly shootout
Fugitive Marokopa father Tom Phillips has died after a shootout with police where an officer was shot in the head with a “high-powered rifle”.
One of Phillip’s children, who was with him at the time, is now in police custody. A search is on for the remaining children.
Phillips’ sister, Rozzi Phillips, earlier confirmed to RNZ her brother was involved and that he had died.
Phillips’ father declined to comment on the unfolding situation.
Acting Deputy Commissioner Jill Rogers spoke to media on Monday morning and said while a formal identification was yet to take place, police believed the man who died was Tom Phillips.
Tom Phillips and his three children had been missing for almost four years. Photo: Supplied / NZ Police
She said police received a call about 2.30am from a member of the public who believed they were witnessing a burglary in action at a rural farm supply store in Piopio.
They told police it involved two people on a quad bike dressed in farm clothing and wearing headlamps.
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“Knowing the information that we’d previously had that seen Tom Phillips also in this area, additional staff were called out and responded to that location,” Rogers said.
The quad bike was observed traveling along the Waipuna Rd which was a rural gravel road that intersects with Te Anga Rd which was the main road that led back to Marokopa.
At 3.20am officers laid spikes at that intersection and the quad bike had run over the spikes. Phillips and one of his children were on the bike at the time. The bike then came to a rest a short time later.
Police outside the back entrance of PGG Wrightson in Piopio on Monday. Photo: NATALIE AKOORIE / RNZ
“The first attending police officer at the scene has come across that stopped quad bike and been confronted by gun fire at close range. Our officer has been struck in the head, he’s immediately fallen to the ground and taken cover.
“Soon after a second patrol unit arrived and engaged the offender and he has died at the scene.”
The officer who was shot was flown to Waikato Hospital by Westpac Rescue. He received critical injuries and will require “numerous surgeries,” she said.
Rogers said police were making “urgent inquiries” to locate Phillips’ other children who police hold “serious concerns for”.
The three children, pictured four years ago. (File photo) Photo: Supplied
The child who was found was being provided “wrap around support”.
“This has been a deeply traumatic incident this morning for those involved, it has been confronting and challenging in a small, rural, isolated location.”
A critical incident investigation was under way. The Independent Police Conduct Authority had also been notified.
The child was not injured in the shootout, Rogers said.
She said there were “multiple firearms” on the quad bike and that the officer was shot with a “high-powered rifle”.
Asked if police knew where the children were, Rogers said they did not.
Acting Deputy Commissioner Jill Rogers. Photo: Photo is screenshot of live broadcast
“We are actively seeking them as we speak,”
“We’ll continue to make inquiries and locating them is our absolute priority.”
Rogers said police were being supported by Oranga Tamariki.
“There are a number of police staff who are actively looking for the children, which remains our number one priority at this stage, to find those children, alongside supporting our injured colleague and his whanau and our other police staff.
“And obviously this is devastating news for Tom Phillips, family as well, and is the outcome that nobody wanted.”
Asked how the officer knew to lay spikes at the intersection, Rogers called it “officer intuition”.
“It’s a long gravel road. I think it’s approximately 30 kilometers through there, knowing that if he was heading back to the Marokopa area, that that would be his route of choice. And that appears to be what has unfolded this morning.”
The officer in charge of the investigation into the search for the family, Detective Senior Sergeant Andy Saunders said what unfolded was “devastating”.
“It’s not the outcome we wanted, but we’ve got one child out safely, and our focus is now is really finding the other children, getting them out safely.”
Two people, believed to be Tom Phillips and one of the children, at a Piopio store last month. Photo: NZ Police / SUPPLIED
PGG Wrightson in Piopio confirmed a burglary happened at its store.
Chief executive Stephen Guerin told RNZ a person broke into the store at 3.30am.
No staff were inside at the time.
He says police have full control of the scene and no staff were allowed inside.
On social media the store confirmed it was closed but said it hoped to be able to open at a later stage today.
Phillips and his three children first went missing in September 2021.
They were found later that month, and it appeared they had gone camping.
Then, a few months later, on December 20 they disappeared again from Marokopa.
Phillips was facing a raft of charges, including aggravated robbery, aggravated wounding, and unlawful possession of a firearm.
There had been repeated calls from the family for Phillips to come forward. Police have long said they believed he was being assisted.
Police released footage of a burglary in Piopio on August 27. They said the footage was believed to show Tom Phillips and one of his children.
The owner of the store earlier said the only thing taken during the break-in was milk, despite butter and vegetables both being on display.
He said the two people used an angle grinder to cut the padlock on his chiller out the back of his store.
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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