It was a shocking and violent end to a mystery that gripped a small nation for years: A fugitive father killed in front of his child, a police officer shot in the head, and two young children found alone at a remote campsite in the wilderness.
The final stanza in the story of Tom Phillips was not how anyone wanted it to end. Not police. Not Phillips’ family. Nor the tiny community of Marokopa – on the rugged West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island – near the campsite, one of many where Phillips and his three children are believed to have been hiding out for almost four years.
His life ended on a rural road in the early hours of Monday morning in a shootout with police, who finally managed to track him down after he was spotted breaking into a store in a small town about an hour away.
One of his three children – Jayda, 12, Maverick, 10 and Ember, 9 – was with him when he died. Their siblings were found hours later, alone at the camp.
Almost everyone in the community is asking the same question: How did it come to this?
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