'He's got a lighter': Officers fought offender in burning garage

With flames licking up above their knees, two police officers struggled to restrain an offender and save all of them from a blazing garage.

The dramatic events of July, 2024 have been recounted today as the two officers were recognised for their bravery.

"I don’t know if we’ll get out of this one," Sergeant Richard Bracey said he thought as he and Constable Friederike Faber tussled in the locked, petrol-soaked garage – and an offender holding a lighter.

They were soon in waist-high flames, desperately trying to find a way to get out.

Faber had responded to a routine family harm incident in Auckland's Clover Park while on patrol last July.

Faber said she had been scanning for jobs while riding as a passenger and self-assigned to a family harm call that had come from one of the victim's adult children living overseas.

"This was one of those cases where I just thought, 'Oh, that sounds interesting'," she said.

“She said her mum is elderly and her partner has been really controlling over her, not allowing her to talk to the kids.

“I thought, ‘Well, it must be significant enough for an adult child overseas to reach out to New Zealand Police'.”

When she and her colleague arrived, they found the woman outside her home. She told the officers about visa and relationship troubles, but the conversation took a darker turn, and "alarm bells" started to ring.

"The longer we talked, the more things came to light… [she said] he made some mention of wanting to burn her or strangle her, and I just thought, ‘OK, we have to do something about this’.”

The woman's partner was served a police safety order through a window, as he had barricaded himself inside the house, refusing to leave. He had turned the power off, meaning the garage's opening system did not work.

"You couldn't actually get to the front door," Faber said.

"There was a pretty high fence around the property, and the fence gate was locked from the inside with a padlock, so the only way to get in and out of the house was through this electronic garage door. I didn't like that at all.”

The woman begged for her partner to come outside, but he continued to refuse.

"I got the feeling we might have to use some force to get him out," Faber said.

She called for additional units to help remove him, which was when Bracey arrived at the scene.

Faber and Bracey climbed over a back fence and went in through an open window.

The man appeared in the hallway, waving fishing rods and shouting.

He retreated into the garage, and the officers followed.

“I pushed the internal door open and he came at me with a large fishing rod, trying to cut me with it,” Bracey said.

The man then dropped the rod and picked up a generator.

Bracey said the man "just looked at me with a ‘I don't give a s*** about you’ look" before tipping petrol across the floor.

“I yelled out to Fritzi, ‘Get out of here!’ but she was still beside me when I tackled him and drove him straight into that main garage door," Bracey said.

The man dropped the generator, but somehow managed to get his hands on a lighter.

Faber said: “S*** really hit the fan when I just heard ‘Friederike, he's got a lighter, and there's petrol everywhere. He’s trying to start a fire. Get out’.

"Then we were tussling, and I saw him holding the lighter. In my head, I thought, ‘If this lighter ignites the petrol, we’ll be toast.’”

Suddenly, the floor went up in flames.

"Flames were up over my knees, sometimes waist height,” Bracey said.

Both Bracey and Faber recalled the rubber soles of their boots burning.

“There were parts of the garage where the flames were probably as high as me," Faber said.

"There was a little fuel canister right at my feet and I just remember thinking, 'You know, if this catches fire, it will blow up in my face'."

She said it became hard to breathe as the garage filled with smoke.

"It was really a sensory overload… your brain just trying to compute and come up with some sort of solution. It was pretty scary."

With the power cut, there was no way out of the building.

“I tried smashing him through the roller door to get him through it, but I only buckled it a little bit,” Bracey said.

“I had two officers at a single door as the back of the garage, and I was yelling at them to smash that door.”

Another constable managed to punch through the safety glass, cutting his hand "badly" in the process.

The offender was dragged outside, and Bracey threw the burning generator out the door as alongside other debris.

"Worrying" for her colleague, Faber ran into a bedroom, grabbed blankets and tried to suffocate the flames where she could. The two also found a tap in the garage and filled anything that could hold water to douse the fire.

“I don’t know why we continued to put the garage out. In your mind, you think you've got to save the house or something. And we did. We got the fire out," Faber said.

Firefighters arrived and took control of the clean up. The offender was taken into custody.

Despite inhaling a lot of smoke, neither officers sustained serious injury.

“I threw my boots away,” Bracey said. “They were soft and melted, but nothing happened to my feet, which was great. They saved my feet from being burnt.”

It was later found that the man had poured petrol around the home's exits.

Bracey believed he was "setting up to take the whole thing down”.

Both maintained the incident hadn't put them off policing.

“Everyone’s got their own coping mechanism. I’ve got a pretty dark sense of humour, so that has helped me a lot in dealing with it," Faber said.

"I’ve been on frontline for nearly four years, and I still love it. I still like coming to work every day. There’s no other job like it.”

Bracey admitted he didn't tell his wife the whole truth of what happened that day.

“I love my job, it is important to me. I’m so proud to be general duties frontline I'll never come off this, because we get there first.”

Both officers were today recognised with Police Association Bravery Awards for their actions.