"An explosion like a landmine."
That is how one officer at the scene of the alleged murder of Senior Sergeant Lyn Fleming described the sound of the impact as the accused’s vehicle hit her.
By Laura James and Mason Herbert
It’s the second week of Hayden Tasker’s trial at the High Court in Christchurch.
The 33-year-old has pleaded not guilty to murdering Fleming and intending to cause grievous bodily harm to Senior Seargent Adam Ramsay in the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2025.
The pair were on foot patrol when Tasker ploughed his white Honda Odyssey into them, sending them both flying.
Senior Constable Jude Yeoman, who gave evidence this morning, told the court: “I heard the car hit people. That’s a hard thing to describe, you don’t hear things like that too often. It was just this incredibly deep, hard thump.”
He knew more than one officer had been hit, as he spotted their hi-vis flying “in all sorts of directions”.
He didn’t know exactly who had been struck at the time but recalled seeing one of his police colleagues being thrown 20 to 30 metres through the air.
“My recollection is seeing them tumbling through the air at great speed and then smashing into the ground kind of like tumbling and rag dolling… the impact on them, was catastrophic.”
He soon discovered that officer was Fleming.
Tasker’s lawyers claim he intended to spark a police chase and ultimately kill himself that night.
But the Crown's case is he was angry at police and aimed for the officers, aware hitting them could cause death.
They say this amounts to murderous intent, but the defence argue Fleming's death was manslaughter.
'She was dead'
Constable Samantha Batchelor also gave evidence.
She got out of a parked patrol car after hearing thumps and that’s when she saw Fleming on the ground.
She testified that one of the officer's legs was badly broken.
When asked by the Crown if Fleming was moving or not, a visibly emotional Batchelor answered: “She was dead”.
Her attention then turned to the vehicle involved in the collision, which she noticed first driving away, then turning back towards her.
With the accused at the wheel, it looped back around the carpark in Nelson’s Buxton Square before ramming into a parked patrol car.
Yeoman told the court, “[the vehicle] was under heavy acceleration and it was going fast and it was under heavy acceleration all the way through to the point of impact".
He didn't see it brake, and said, if it had, “it would have been quite easy to avoid that impact".
“But it didn’t, it just went crunch right into the back of that police car,” he told the jury.
It was the same car Batchelor had just been seated in.
The court heard it was Batchelor that went on to fire a taser at Tasker, who was in the driver’s seat, three times.
She couldn’t be sure if it worked or not.
In cross examination, she confirmed Tasker had his eyes fixed ahead as she aimed the taser in his direction. The defence suggested he was “in a daze,”, but Batchelor said she couldn’t say.
The constable, who remained teary throughout her evidence, said she then moved on to help Ramsay.
Batchelor suggested taking off his body armour, telling the court: “I thought he was going to need CPR. I thought he was going to die.”
“I remember Adam asking if he was the only person hurt or if someone else was hurt as well.”
Nearby, others were administering CPR to Fleming.
Yeoman was among them, saying: “I continued doing chest compressions for quite some time.”
Even after paramedics arrived he kept working on Fleming, he said.
"In this process I do have a really distinct recollection of Lyn's body, I don't know, almost coming back to life, if that's the right term, possibly isn't, but it's just made this huge big heave, like this big type of inhalation, this big heave.”
She was soon taken away by ambulance staff, but died of her injuries in hospital.
Fleming is the first policewoman to be killed in the line of duty in New Zealand.
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