“Anger towards the police.”
That’s the reason the man accused of murdering Senior Sergeant Lyn Fleming gave for driving his car at high speed, towards police officers on the morning of New Year’s Day last year.
By Mason Herbert and Laura James
The jury was this afternoon played an interview filmed with the accused in his police cell in the hours after the incident, which left Fleming with non-survivable injuries.
It's the second week of Hayden Tasker’s murder trial at the High Court in Christchurch.
The 33-year-old argues he’s guilty of manslaughter, not murder in relation to Fleming’s death, and has also pleaded not guilty to intentionally causing grievous bodily injury to another officer, Senior Sergeant Adam Ramsay.
The accused was arrested in Nelson’s Buxton Square after being pulled from his Honda Odyssey, and was taken to a police cell.
Detective Jesse Gaskell was sent to speak with him soon after.
A video the officer took shows Tasker using a cup on the floor to demonstrate the moment he drove his car into the senior sergeants.
Shortly before the video was taken, Gaskell testified he asked Tasker a number of questions.
"Do you realise what you have done tonight?" and, "You have run over three people tonight in your car, do you realise that?"
To both, the accused answered: "I don’t care."
Tasker, who was more than three times the legal drinking limit for driving that night, claims he did not intend to kill Fleming. Instead, he wanted to attract the attention of police, spark a chase and kill himself.
The accused told Gaskell he’d put 40 litres of petrol in his car and would have made it to Christchurch.
Crown Prosecutor Mark O’Donoghue asked the detective if he gave “any clear answer about how people die by cops chasing them".
Gaskell answered, “no”.
The court’s heard Tasker was depressed, unemployed and living in his car.
He told the detective, losing his stepfather as a teenager was one of his motivations to end his life.
“I was going to be with my dad. It was going to be glorious.”
But, in the video filmed by Gaskell, Tasker also admits he was aiming for police.
When asked about his intention when driving into the officers, he said “it was all just anger towards police obviously for what I'd been done for in the past.”
Gaskell said he told the accused, "a police officer might die tonight".
In the video, the accused is heard saying: “If they die, I have to take that to the grave.”
The detective told the court: “He didn't appear to show much emotion in terms of what I just told him and the way he was describing how he was driving that night.”
The jury heard, after he'd stopped videoing, Tasker went on to share statistics with Gaskell about a person’s likelihood of survival after being hit by a car.
“And is your recollection that he mentioned a few specific speeds and said that as the speed increases the chances of injury or death are higher?”, O’Donoghue asked.
“Yes,” Gaskell replied.
Senior Seargent Lyn Fleming died of her injuries in hospital.
She was the first female police officer in New Zealand to be killed in the line of duty.
The trial continues.
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