"An explosion like a landmine", 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.
‘She wasn't breathing and there was no pulse’
Constable Molly Inman was the first officer to reach Fleming's side, immediately checking for a pulse, and finding none.
“I saw both of her legs were sticking out at quite awkward angles so I assumed them to be broken. She was lying on her back and facing up towards the sky. She had both her arms to each side.
“I tilted her head back a little bit to make sure her airway wasn't blocked by the head positioning, but she wasn't breathing and there was no pulse,” she told the court.
As she prepared to start CPR, she heard the car that’d already struck once, coming back towards them.
Inman dragged her colleague to safety, before beginning compressions.
She soon heard the defendant's vehicle crash into the back of the parked patrol car, and recalled hearing the engine revving as she worked on Fleming.
Inman was one of four rotating doing CPR, finding it hard to hold back tears as she recalled the moment.
“At one point, I was doing compressions, she tried to take a breath but there was a lot of blood in her throat.”
The constable said she did her best to clear the airway.
Yeoman was among those taking turns at compressions, saying: “I continued doing chest compressions for quite some time.”
Even after paramedics arrived, he kept going, 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.
‘Lyn was deeply comatose’
The first doctor to assess Fleming when she arrived at Nelson Hospital that morning said it was “immediately apparent that she had very seriously life-threatening injuries".
Dr Gillian Hood this afternoon explained the damage to Lyn’s body meant “death was inevitable".
She spoke in detail about the injuries, especially to Fleming's head.
“What has been involved that has caused that degree of injury is the momentum from the combined mass of the car and driver and the momentum of the movement, the speed added to that, which is all of which momentum was transferred to Lyn's skull and brain.”
While she knew the injuries were non-survivable, the Nelson team sought additional advice from neurosurgeons in Wellington.
“They agreed that there was no intervention that would make any difference in outcome for Lyn.”
Hood was the one to relay that to Fleming’s family.
“I think that one of the few comforts that can be got is that she was, Lynn was deeply comatose from the time that it happened and would not have been aware subsequent to that."
Fleming was the first policewoman to be killed in the line of duty in New Zealand.
SHARE ME