A preposterous headline appears on a Stuff story (here) this morning.
It says –
Cops’ mistake may have cost P-maker’s life
The headline writer would have been influenced by the no-less-preposterous opening sentence of the story –
A man who died from toxic fumes caused by the P-lab he had set up in a Coromandel cave would probably be alive today were it not for a police cock-up.
He would much more likely be alive today, of course, if he hadn’t gone into the cave with a fellow villain to make P.
The toxic fumes from the P manufacturing lark was clearly what did him in.
Remember what happened?
Stuff gives us the background at the same time as it virtually ignores the combination of caves, criminality and toxic fumes to focus on whatever some cops did or didn’t do a year ago.
The bodies of Grant Wyllie, 49, and Kerry Alexander Murphy, 40, were retrieved from an abandoned mine shaft near Whitianga on October 13.
The pair had set up a makeshift methamphetamine lab and it’s believed a petrol-powered generator caused them to die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
So the buggers merrily made P in the confined space of a cave with energy driven by a petrol-powered generator.
Most of the rest of us – it would be nice to think – have learned from the recent weekend incident in Auckland (here) to treat petrol-driven generators with great respect.
The two expired P makers weren’t with us long enough to have learned the same lesson.
But someone with enough knowledge of chemistry to be able to make P should have learned something about carbon monoxide poisoning.
Stuff then states the obvious –
Murphy should not have been there.
He shouldn’t have been there making P, at least, and even more obviously he shouldn’t have been using a petrol-driven generator to aid and abet him in this nefarious drug-manufacturing operation.
But that’s not what Stuff means when it says he should not have been there.
It is saying he should not have been there because the cops bungled his prosecution many months earlier.
The bizarre logic is that if the cops had not bungled the case, then …
Well, he would not have been in the cave when he died.
A year before his death, charges of possession of methamphetamine for supply and possession of equipment used to manufacture the Class A drug were thrown out of court.
Justice Allan granted the Sunday Star-Times access to a High Court file which shows Murphy was caught “red handed” with 1.67 kilograms of P – worth around $1.5 million – in his Morrinsville home in May, 2009.
However, “conscious recklessness” by police, who were eventually found to have misled the court, meant the evidence found during the warrantless search was unusable and Murphy was released.
Alf won’t tire you with details of what happened in a series of events harking back to February 2009, when a Constable John Grantham was given information by a police informant that someone in the Morrinsville area was selling drugs.
But he hereby records what the judge said when ruling key evidence as inadmissible.
“I regard the outcome without any satisfaction. There’s little doubt that the accused are major drug offenders. The general public is likely to view the result with some dismay but there are wider interests at stake.”
The Stuff report concludes much the same as it begins –
By September, 2011, the charges against Murphy and his two co-accused had been dropped and he was free to keep making meth – until his death.
Murphy was just as free – of course – to stop making meth.
After this brush with the law, he just might have considered himself lucky and decided to find something else to do to earn a buck.
Something that didn’t involve caves and toxic fumes.