An \u2018orange flicker\u2019<\/p>\n
Crown lawyer Kim McCoy told the jury Williams\u2019 former partner Anthony Buckton spent a lot of time in his \u201cbeloved\u201d workshop.<\/p>\n
The workshop was at the back of Buckton\u2019s mother\u2019s home in Weymouth, South Auckland, and he spent hours in there working on cars with his friends.<\/p>\n
At the time, Buckton and Williams had been in a relationship for about six years and lived together in a caravan on the property.<\/p>\n
On the day of February 11, 2022, McCoy said the couple argued and Buckton punched Williams in the face, with the police then being called.<\/p>\n
Buckton cut off his ankle monitor and fled.<\/p>\n
Around midnight, Buckton\u2019s mother Sharon Pawa was awoken to phone calls from her son, telling her to check that his belongings hadn\u2019t been set alight.<\/p>\n
He had forwarded three voice messages to his mother that he claimed were from Williams.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll your s***\u2019s already f***in\u2019 burnt so don\u2019t even bother trying to get it,\u201d one of the messages said.<\/p>\n
Pawa looked outside and saw an \u201corange flicker\u201d in the distance, before the workshop erupted in flames.<\/p>\n
The court was told she then saw Williams walking away from the fire and heard her saying something along the lines of \u201cyour son\u2019s stuff is burning\u201d.<\/p>\n
The pair allegedly got into a scuffle, before Williams was able to get away.<\/p>\n
McCoy claimed Williams had doused the workshop with petrol before setting it on fire with her own lighter.<\/p>\n
Police later found empty petrol cans and a lighter, the latter of which McCoy said had fallen out of Williams\u2019 pocket.<\/p>\n
The mother<\/p>\n
The Crown\u2019s first witness was Sharon Pawa, Buckton\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n
She said she had begun the day of the fire by working on her \u201cquite big\u201d back yard, which often took all day.<\/p>\n
At first, she had heard the couple arguing but it started off as their normal day-to-day bickering.<\/p>\n
Later, in the afternoon, she heard them yelling and screaming and Williams came out to say Buckton had hit her.<\/p>\n
Pawa said she grabbed her son, who claimed Williams was trying to \u201ccut herself\u201d, and Williams went inside to call the police.<\/p>\n
Her \u201creally angry\u201d son cut off his ankle bracelet, which monitored his 24-hour curfew, and disappeared down the driveway, Pawa said.<\/p>\n
She carried on with the garden work until about 8.30pm, when she went inside for a cup of tea, to relax before bed.<\/p>\n
The explosion<\/p>\n
Pawa said her son was repeatedly calling her and asking her to check if his partner was okay, so she went out and saw Williams asleep in the caravan next to a bottle of vodka and her dog.<\/p>\n
Annoyed with her son\u2019s constant calls and messages, Pawa ignored them and went to sleep, until she was awoken to a call from him around midnight.<\/p>\n
She said she went outside and saw a \u201clittle bit of orange light\u201d, followed by her son\u2019s partner walking by with her dog.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of a sudden there was a great big explosion in the back yard,\u201d Pawa said.<\/p>\n
She said she vaguely remembered Williams saying \u201cit\u2019s all on fire now\u201d or \u201clit up\u201d or something like that and yelling abuse about her son.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me she seemed a bit like she was still intoxicated,\u201d Pawa said. \u201c… Slurring her words and screaming.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pawa \u2018lost it\u2019<\/p>\n
Disoriented by the explosion, Pawa said she \u201clost it\u201d and lunged at the woman, grabbing her by her hair.<\/p>\n
In the scuffle, Pawa fell into the woodshed and when she got up, Williams was gone.<\/p>\n
The next day she found that a petrol can she used for the mower had moved and was empty, as well as finding a black lighter in the area where she and Williams had fought.<\/p>\n
Pawa smokes but when asked if the lighter was hers, she said it wasn\u2019t and hadn\u2019t been there before the fire.<\/p>\n
\u2018Tunnel vision\u2019<\/p>\n
Tava said the trial was a case of \u201ctunnel vision\u201d by the police, who had \u201calmost immediately\u201d believed Pawa\u2019s version of events.<\/p>\n
\u201cMs Williams had nothing to do with this fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a lack of evidence of his client setting the blaze, and the man cave was \u201cpacked\u201d with \u201call kinds of flammable substances\u201d.<\/p>\n
The woman had been assaulted by her partner nine hours earlier but that was not a motive to start a fire, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost people don\u2019t respond with being punched in the face by setting fire to a house.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said she instead fled an abusive relationship and, four years later, the Crown were going with Pawa\u2019s version of events that were \u201cnot grounded in reality\u201d.<\/p>\n
The trial continues.<\/p>\n
Ella Scott-Fleming has been a journalist for three years and previously worked at the Otago Daily Times, Gore Ensign and Metro Magazine. She has an interest in court and general reporting. She\u2019s currently based in Auckland covering justice-related stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An \u2018orange flicker\u2019 Crown lawyer Kim McCoy told the jury Williams\u2019 former partner Anthony Buckton spent a lot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1117,11154,20191,2079,2082,42,1364,17211,5158,43,1118,143,9833,61,40,38,41,39,54,13971],"class_list":["post-458664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-accused","tag-begins","tag-cave","tag-fire","tag-for","tag-headlines","tag-her","tag-laura","tag-man","tag-news","tag-of","tag-partners","tag-setting","tag-to","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-trial","tag-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}