Tauranga McLaren Falls Homicide: Girlfriend recalls witnessing her partner’s last moments after being shot

Alana Wingrove is at least thankful that the killers didn’t know she was upstairs with her 9-year-old son when they opened fire.

All he heard was a shower of gunshots from a distance, as he watched Tyson play Playstation in the second floor living room of his isolated McLaren Falls rental.

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It was just after 7 p.m. on February 11, just two months after she moved into temporary accommodation on the southwestern outskirts of Tauranga.

As soon as he began to understand what was happening, he grabbed Tyson and pushed him to the ground.

“I said to my son ‘****, get down on the ground.’ Basically it was very fast and then I heard a car take off and as they drove away, God knows in which direction,” he said on the 30th.

“It’s lucky that me and my son weren’t visible, I guess. I couldn’t see what was happening, so I had no idea. All I could think was, ‘Okay, I need to keep myself and my son safe. Very moment “.

His four-year-old partner, Paul Lasslett, was next door, renovating the house he owned.

There was a brief silence before Wingrove heard another man working on the property yelling “You need to get down here. I think they are both dead.”

He hurried up and faced two bodies.

“Obviously I ran to the person I loved and was still alive at the time. Not that I was responding or anything,” Wingrove said.

“I was scared and worried. When I came down and saw that Paul had been shot, he was beside me.

“Basically 111 was already on the phone and I tried to give them details about the wound. They told me the only thing I could do was apply pressure, which I did for 10 minutes.”

“Paul was face down on the ground, and he only had a gunshot wound to his back, so he was applying pressure to his back.

“I didn’t want to move it or anything because I didn’t know. That might not help. It could make things worse.”

“But I think it was in front and out. So all the blood was coming out the front onto the mat, not the towel that I was pressing on.”

Even though a nurse came from a neighboring property to help, very little could be done, Wingrove says.

“I tried to save him. I did everything I could but there was nothing no one could have done.”

“He had a heartbeat but he wasn’t there. Like, his eyes were half closed but he wasn’t speaking. I tried to speak to him to ask him what I could do to help him. He wasn’t there. I know he wasn’t there.”

“I was truly terrified. I had to make sure that my son was safe and well and I also had to try to prevent my boyfriend from dying. So it was very difficult.”

Lasslett, 43, and Nick Littlewood, 32, were killed on the McLaren Falls property on Ormsby Lane.

A 25-year-old man, Samuel Fane, pleaded not guilty to two murder charges when he appeared, via an audio-visual link from prison, in the Tauranga High Court on February 26.

Over the course of a week, four people would end up dead, in what was initially speculated to be a gang conflict.

Two months after the trauma of seeing his partner die before his eyes, Wingrove lives with his mother in Tauranga and tries to readjust himself, with the help of counseling.

She says she was questioned by police for approximately five hours after the murders, but since then little information has been provided to her.

Annoying.

“Sometimes I worry if I am safe. The police are not giving out any information at all.

“All my friends and family have been very supportive of me. But they didn’t have to be there, and they didn’t have to go through that. So it’s really difficult.”

“I feel very anxious to go anywhere, even to leave the house. I guess it is something that I have to deal with in time.”

His fond memories of Lasslett are bitter consolation.

“He always gave people the benefit of the doubt. Even when my little brother lost his job, he gave him a job on the farm two days a week, just keeping the land and things like that,” Wingrove said.

“Things he didn’t have to do, he did it just for the goodness of his own heart.

“It makes me sick. He really does. I don’t think anyone deserves to die like this, especially someone like Paul.”

“He was always so kind, so generous. He just didn’t deserve this. He was the last person who imagined this would happen to him.”