FEAR DOES strange things to people…
It creates invisible monsters from nothing – monsters who fuel our insecurities and challenge our morality.
They’ll look at you like a long lost friend, and then, when you’re looking away they go to work with feverish intensity.
With this story, we know the devil is out there somewhere. Eventually patience and persistence will lead us to him or them.
He doesn’t wear a Spiderman mask. He’s the person who put the gun in Ned Paraha’s hand. That’s our devil.
So again let’s go back to that night in 2014 to look for clues.
It’s around 11.30pm, and from nowhere Paraha appears on the scene at Matt Blomfield’s house, armed and you assume dangerous. He’s there to kill Blomfield.
Blomfield’s initial reaction to the threat is what you’d expect from anyone with a family to protect. He becomes the Lion. He roars. He fights.
But then he drops to his knees when it matters most and lets Paraha escape into the night. Which all seems rather curious.
Why is he checking on his wife and daughter who weren’t in danger?
When the gun failed on Paraha, the threat against Blomfield was at best neutralised, at worst minimised. But if Paraha escaped there was a chance he could come back to finish the job off.
In the book Blomfield describes how Paraha just vanished – “the man seemed to have gone,” he told author Margie Thomson.
People do not just simply vanish. Especially people dressed in Spiderman masks on the wrong side of town late at night.
There was no vanishing act. Paraha escaped because for whatever reason Blomfield allowed him to escape.
Why didn’t he look for him? Why didn’t he call on the neighbours to help?
There may be an explanation to all this, but it’s been eight years and still we are none the wiser.
Yes Blomfield was bleeding and injured but he was not incapacitated.
Margie obviously thought nothing of it or she would have asked more questions. Surely Margie should have drilled down hard in this part of the story, analysed every aspect, every detail, checking the credibility and corroborating the real evidence. Spring says “I made several requests using the Official Information Act and the Privacy Act with regard to seeing if Margie Thomson had made any requests about me from the NZ Police, and the Police replied that no she had not, so how she drew the conclusions on me I will never know… the real hit job has been on me… but I suspect that was the plan all along”
“When I think back to Blomfield’s Radio NZ interview, his claims that lawyers had looked over every angle, every aspect, a line by line legal opinion, he was hoping I would not go legal on the author and publishers” More on the lawyers involved in a later post.
In the book Margie Thomson explains how this was a hazy period for Blomfield, then in the next breath contradicts herself by providing a crystal clear blow-by-blow account of everything that played out that evening. Where’s the haze she’s referring to? What information is she relying on? Only Blomfield’s version of events it seems. So much for investigative journalism.
So we have Blomfield recalling the exact moment Paraha had the gun aimed at his head. Margie writes: “Matt experienced a second of absolute clarity: ‘Fuck, he’d registered, ‘this guy is actually going to kill me.” Blomfield is clearly stating the obvious which is constituted, I suppose, as clarity.
We then have the dramatic moment Blomfield is ‘staring helplessly into the barrel’ of Paraha’s gun certain he’s not going to save himself or his family. Part fear, part realisation and yes clarity.
The Police and ambos arrive and then Blomfield turns. One could argue this is where the clarity ends.
The cops and ambulance staff are there to help Blomfield but they’re being shown no respect at all. Blomfield has been shot at (the bullet missed him and hit his house). He’s bleeding like a stuck pig after fighting with Paraha, and he’s told he needs to get to a hospital.
But Blomfield is going nowhere. He bizarrely responds by telling the ambos to “fuck off”. What’s really going on?
Margie writes: “He got aggressive with them. ‘Fuck off. I am not getting in that ambulance.”
Marc Spring says “that’s more than aggressive”. “That’s unhinged and just plain rude”, he says. “There is no excuse for this. They were there to help, not be treated like shit.”
Blomfield put the outburst down to the fact that he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving his wife and daughter.
But he’d been shot at. There was blood dripping from his forehead so really there were only two options. Leave Rebecca and the daughter at home and get to the hospital pronto or bleed out and leave Rebecca and the daughter at home for good – but at least save them a trip to the hospital. Silly, isn’t it?
The Police were there and Paraha had vanished… but again this where the story gets weird. The book states that 40 Armed Offenders were despatched to the Blomfield home, however Spring received the following reply from an OIA request he made of the NZ Police on 29 May 2021 “I can advise that approximately 20 armed staff attended this incident initially. These Police staff members were from various frontline response covering the North Shore area. The Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) were not deployed” So only half the number of Police and no Armed Offenders Squad at the scene… as we say, the devil is in the detail.
Spring says “this is just one of so many examples where the facts are simply not the facts, just made up exaggerations to bolster the narrative” “Time and time again, I keep casting my mind back to the front cover where its states this book is a masterpiece of meticulous research, when its clearly not”.
We have plenty more OIA requests that we will be covering on this blog, and most of them have been sent to the lawyers, Wynn Williams, and to date there has been no replies, no explanations, just a thanks received email from one of the many lawyers working for the insurers of Margie Thomson and Potton & Burton.
Spring says “its quite incredible that I can make all these requests, obtain the factual evidence, yet the book really has none” Spring goes on to say “I find myself of the opinion the book was deliberately written with its knowingly false narrative as the plan was first to hope nobody sued, and if they did it didn’t matter anyway as the insurers would just have to pick up the costs and settlements”
We will never know why people react the way they do in times of crisis, especially with this case because as we know no one bothered to ask or check any facts.
We have plenty more OIA requests that we will be covering on this blog, and most of them have been sent to the lawyers, Wynn Williams, and to date there has been no replies, no explanations, just a thanks received email from one of the many lawyers working for the insurers of Margie Thomson and Potton & Burton.
Spring says “its quite incredible that I can make all these requests, obtain the factual evidence, yet the book really has none” Spring goes on to say “I find myself of the opinion the book was deliberately written with its knowingly false narrative as the plan was first to hope nobody sued, and if they did it didn’t matter anyway as the insurers would just have to pick up the costs and settlements”
We will never know why people react the way they do in times of crisis, especially with this case because as we know no one bothered to ask or check any facts.
We are reserving our judgment but there are things that don’t add up.
Detail’s that don’t make sense. Is it that possibly the place we might find the clues to where out devil is?
And we aren’t ambos so we won’t accept just being told to ‘f*** off.
