People had been counting the days. Thursday the 20th. The FIFA World Cup beginning.
In Auckland, where the rain has almost begun to feel permanent, and the wetness and the traffic and the high cost of living here begin to really weigh on you in wintry July, today was an island to swim towards. Eden Park was sold out. The sacred home of rugby – full! For a football game!
Down on Queen’s Wharf, The Cloud had been transformed into the “FIFA Fan Festival”, all welcome, children, families, tourists.
And then, suddenly, directly across the road from The Cloud, something terrible began to happen.
Peak hour in New Zealand’s biggest city was brought to a standstill. (Source: 1News)
“At 7:22am”, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster would later tell us, “police received multiple emergency calls with reports of a person discharging a firearm from inside the third floor of a building under construction at the bottom of Queen Street.”
That’s where the trains arrive, and the buses, and the ferries. Many thousands of people every weekday morning, spilling out through there to begin their working day. Or head to school or university. It’s the heart of central Auckland. And someone was shooting at it.
Or, they were shooting at people, inside the Deloitte building. One Queen Street. A $298 million refurbishment. Is there a flasher commercial address in this country? The city beneath it. Auckland’s very special harbour, the gorgeous view to the north.
By the time I got down there, the construction workers who’d begun their morning in all the usual ways, were standing out on Quay Street looking like they were trying to make sense of something beyond sense.
Many were skilled migrant workers. I met perhaps a dozen Filipinos, and a woman who knew some of them, and had come to check that they were okay. They told me some of them had run out of the building and some of them stayed in the building, “the toilet” one said, and tried to hide.
What a terrible choice to have to make. The open ground beneath the windows, or the risk of being trapped inside.
They did a roll call to see who was there. A head count.
I met an apprentice electrician, young and so proud of the trade he was acquiring, who stood with his white helmet still on, although we were out beneath the sky, and told me he couldn’t understand any of it. “Why?”
Why?
Keagan, a South African immigrant full of gratitude for his New Zealand life, told me he’d just hopped off a bus when everything began. The cries. The running. The sirens. The workers sprinting out of the building and the police bravely sprinting in.
“This doesn’t happen in New Zealand," he said.
But it did.
“The offender made his way up the through the building site, discharging his firearm on multiple occasions,” Andrew Coster said.
People told me they could hear the shots, but didn’t know they were shots, at first.
Police raced to a construction site at the bottom of Queen St just as the work day was beginning. (Source: 1News)
Keagan said people lingered, trying to see what was happening. But when the shouting began, “there’s a man with a gun”, those terrifying words echoing across Britomart Plaza, they ran.
At around eight o’clock, armed police officers located the offender inside a lift shaft. Andrew Coster said they tried to talk him out. The offender opened fire. “Shots were exchanged and the offender was later found deceased.”
Three people were found “deceased”, to use the Commissioner’s word. The offender and “two members of the public”, who were almost certainly workers on the site.
A shotgun. A man who had some awful point to make. Three lives gone.
Life asserts itself. On Quay Street, a woman asked if the ferries were still running and seemed aggrieved that they weren’t.
A group of secondary school students, who’d arrived by ferry just before the shooting started, sat on the footpath in a quiet circle. Safe.
An American tourist, whose clothes suggested the kind of nonchalant wealth you don’t often see in downtown Auckland, inquired what was happening. “Is it for the soccer?” he asked, looking at the road blocks.
You always wonder - why?
I went to Christchurch, after the mosque shootings in 2019. That terrible, murderous hate. Fifty-one lives taken.
The city echoing with hurt. The whole central city, silent. And then the flowers arriving.
We now know the “why” of Christchurch. That grotesque manifesto, with all its viciousness and extremism and lies.
Doubtless, we’ll learn the twisted “why” of Auckland, soon enough.
The 24-year-old gunman (what an awful word) had worked at the construction site, and although he was on some form of home detention for crimes, including “male assaults female”, he had permission to go to work.
“This was an incredibly alarming incident for workers who were just starting their day," Andrew Coster said.
Life somehow survives the worst we can do.
Tonight, New Zealand will play Norway, and excited children in the crowd will cheer for the Football Ferns, and we will stand close together, 40,000 of us, sharing the miracle of trust.
This morning, on a construction site, a man reminded us that our reliance on each other includes such very simple things.
The right to go to work.
The right to believe that a bang is not a gunshot.
The right to hope the bus ride to town will be so uneventful it will be forgotten the moment it’s over, and we will be gifted, once again, the wonder of an ordinary day.
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