The parents of Tom Phillips have made a public apology for the “trouble” caused by their son during nearly four years on the run with his three young children.<\/p>\n
Phillips died following a shootout with police after they were called to reports of a burglary early on September 8 in Marakopa, Waikato.<\/p>\n
A police officer was shot multiple times and has since been discharged from Waikato Hospital.<\/p>\n
In a letter to the editor published by King Country News\u00a0today, Neville and Julia Phillips said they did not support their son’s actions.<\/p>\n
“We would like to send our sincere apology to all those in the Waitomo\/Otorohanga districts, most especially those in the Marokopa\/Te Anga community for all the trouble, inconvenience, loss of privacy and property caused by Tom.<\/p>\n
“We in no way supported him or agreed with any of his actions in the past 4 years. We are truly sorry for all that you had to endure.”<\/p>\n
Police said Phillips opened fire after his quad bike was spiked, striking the officer in the head and shoulder before being fatally shot by police.<\/p>\n
After the incident, police uncovered multiple makeshift camps where the family had been living.<\/p>\n
Items recovered include quad and trail bikes, tarpaulins, oil containers and tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The parents of Tom Phillips have made a public apology for the “trouble” caused by their son during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-68133","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68133","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=68133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}