August 2, 2008
It might have looked like just another car crash, but it brought turmoil and tragedy in its wake. Geoff Collett reports. -------------------- In the long and busy life of the No 2 courtroom at the Nelson District Court, it is a barely noteworthy occasion. The room is crowded, but that's not saying much - 30 people have it near overflowing. Most are here for one reason, the first hearing to be called after the lunchbreak.
A diminutive Asian woman emerges from the packed public gallery and stands in the dock. She looks bewildered, utterly out of place. Her lawyer launches into his submissions. Before long, a man standing in the back of the courtroom interjects angrily: "Bullshit!" - and is thrown out by the judge. "Arsehole, " the man says as he leaves. A cop goes after him. The tension doesn't diminish.
The Asian woman is allowed to address the court and breaks into tears, her voice shaking and breaking as she pleads for forgiveness.
The judge takes some pity. Her exemplary life and record are duly noted. Some in the packed gallery mutter darkly. All faces are sombre.
The hearing ends and the small crowd disperses into the grey afternoon. Nobody has won. The court gets on with the rest of the day's business. The case of the untimely death of Lionel Holman is over.
The next day, Violet Mansbridge and her husband Bill are at home on their boat at the Nelson marina, talking about the Lionel Holman they knew. Their connections with him go back years. Bill recalls him from his own childhood, growing up in Wakefield, where Lionel worked at one of the sawmills. There are fond words, deep and painful reflection, tears, a little laughter.
Violet was originally from Malaysia but has lived in New Zealand for 40 years or more. She and Bill met about 15 years ago.
The couple are devoted Christians. They belong to All Saints church in Nelson's Vanguard St and have sailed up to the Pacific islands to do missionary work, but their main work - certainly Violet's - has been as caregivers for the intellectually disabled. That was how they really got to know Lionel, and his family who helped share his care.
Shortly, Bill will drive Violet - Binky, as she's known - to work at IDSS, the Nelson district health board's intellectual disability support service. She can't drive herself because the court took her driver's licence away for six months, as part of her punishment for her role in Lionel's death. She has to pay $1000 to his family - no small penalty for a woman of limited means, the judge noted. And she will do 120 hours' community service, the completion of the price she will pay for careless driving causing death, as the charge has it.
Across town in Tahunanui, thoughts of Lionel occupy Anne and Bill Gutsell too. Mostly, they are angry.
In a battered blue plastic folder, Anne has written out pages of long-hand notes of her memories of Lionel's last days. There is anger evident there, too, and bewilderment and grief. She writes of her love for her brother and her dismay at how he died.
She writes about "Binky" as well, of watching Mansbridge in court and feeling no pity, no sorrow for the frightened, weeping woman. She should have got more. Bill Gutsell echoes the point: she should have been done for manslaughter.
It was Bill who was thrown out of the courtroom. He's unrepentant. He doesn't strike you as a sort who backs down for much - a solid-looking working man, heavily tattooed on his arms.
"We've put up with lies and scapegoating ever since Lionel's been under the care of the hospital board, " he says, referring to Lionel's years in institutional care, his treatment for conditions the family were sceptical about, the high-handed way they felt treated by the health authorities, the way he was dealt with by Nelson Hospital in the days before his death, the handling of the investigation into the accident that killed him.
The lawyer's arguments on behalf of Mansbridge were just more of the same. The Gutsells feel the system has conspired against him. Even the pathologist's verdict on the cause of death - "bronchopneumonia secondary to blunt-force chest injury" - seems to be a distortion of the truth they see: that if Violet Mansbridge hadn't driven carelessly on Easter Monday, 2008, Lionel would still be here.
The Holman family, originally from Stoke, was a big one - six siblings - although by 2008 Lionel and Anne were long since the only ones left living in Nelson. Lionel stayed with the Gutsells regularly.
The recollections of the Mansbridges and the Gutsells suggest Lionel was a somewhat cantankerous character. Problems with drinking saw him admitted to the now defunct Ngawhatu Hospital out the back of Stoke in the early 1960s, when he was in his mid-20s. He was eventually discharged but had on-going health problems.
The Gutsells talk of problems from his drinking, his medication and the damage done to him by shock treatment while he was in Ngawhatu. He eventually ended up back there and remained in care for the rest of his life, moving into an IDSS community home when the hospital was wound down during the 1990s.
He was a passionate smoker and loved trips to the pub, country-and-western music, karaoke. He was a favourite with some of his caregivers. The Mansbridges recall how he flirted shamelessly with Violet, telling Bill he was going to steal his wife away, or announcing to Violet he was going to serenade her with a love song, then launching into a rendition of The Pub With No Beer.
Easter Monday was a classic sunny, warm Nelson autumn day. Lionel had been agitated and unhappy, keen to get out of the house he shared with a couple of other IDSS "clients". He wanted a trip to Rabbit Island. A bit of time and a cigarette by the beach and he was sure he'd feel better.
Violet Mansbridge has pondered the day endlessly since - "over and over and over and over and over again, a million, million times since" - especially whether a trip out was the right thing.
She and the three housemates got the house sorted out in the morning and piled into the small IDSS Nissan car, with a final instruction from a happy Lionel: "Don't let me forget my wallet. I'd like to shout you an ice cream on the way home."
They headed for the beach down Lower Queen St. Mansbridge's story - the one accepted by the court - is that as she approached the tight bend into Lansdowne Rd, doing 80kmh, she was distracted by Lionel in the seat behind her. He lurched forward, she says, and she feared he was about to have a seizure. She didn't notice she was nearly into the intersection, a 90-degree turn with a recommended speed of 25kmh.
The family of four in a Range Rover coming the other way saw what was about to happen, but by then there wasn't much anybody could do. The tiny Nissan smacked into the front of the Range Rover - police suspect Mansbridge's speed hadn't dropped much below 80 - and shunted it out of the intersection. The Nissan's airbags activated, its front stoved in, but as the dust settled and the ambulance arrived, there seemed to be only walking wounded.
Mansbridge, Lionel and one of the other passengers were taken to hospital for a check-over. Lionel complained of a sore chest. He had obvious bruising from his seatbelt. An x-ray was taken but nothing untoward found. He was sent on his way but was still in pain.
He saw his GP the next day and was given codeine.
The Gutsells had been out of town for the weekend. Anne was shaken by the phonecall advising that her brother had been in an accident, but was reassured that there was no need to rush home. But by the time she saw him on the Tuesday, she was convinced he wasn't right.
Another IDSS staffer suggested he was just feeling sorry for himself. That still rankles now. She says her brother was in distress, having trouble walking, making a strange noise when he breathed, complaining of pain in his chest. She stayed with him a while, fretted over his condition, talked to the caregivers, and dwelled on her brother when she went home that night.
The phone rang about 7.15 the next morning. Lionel had got up sometime during the night to make himself a cup of tea and have a smoke. When the others arose, they found him dead on the floor.
There were questions, of course, and the post-mortem only raised more. Lionel had undetected broken ribs, but also evidence of bronchial pneumonia. Why hadn't hospital staff picked that up? Why didn't the police immediately treat the accident as a serious crash scene? Did his caregivers take his complaints of being sick and sore seriously?
"Was it because Lionel was 70 and lived in a community home, and they thought he had had his day? I believe in my heart that's what happened, " Anne says.
They have complained to the hospital, and the district health board says it is treating the case seriously. Lionel's death is classified as a "sentinel event" - a significant failure of the hospital's care, in other words - but for now the board isn't saying whether any disciplinary action will result.
It has been left to the courts to deal with Violet Mansbridge. She has kept her job with IDSS and speaks of her gratitude to her employer and co-workers for their support.
The court, too, saw a good woman, one who pleaded guilty as soon as she could, accepting that whatever questions surround Lionel's treatment after the crash, it was her actions that killed him.
"You are obviously a good person doing a good job, " Judge Tony Zohrab told her. "You set a good example to your fellow citizens."
For Mansbridge, though, the turmoil of the past four months is only compounded by the bitterness and anger Lionel's family holds for her. At his funeral, she asked for their forgiveness and, she says, "it was gladly given".
But immediately after, they turned on her. They refused when she asked to work through the restorative justice process with them, as part of her amends for the crash. When she made her tearful plea to the court for forgiveness, the mutterings from the family were audible: "Never . . . You won't get it from me, lady". When the court ordered reparation, similar mutterings were clear, that she could "stick" the $1000.
"We like Binky, " Bill Gutsell said after the sentencing. "If she can only come out and accept her responsibility."
The problem is that what the family sees as her responsibility is different from what the court has accepted. Lionel's relatives think her behaviour behind the wheel was reckless rather than careless. They rubbish her claim that Lionel was susceptible to fits. They even dismiss the suggestion that she and Lionel had any particularly close bond. Other caregivers meant more to him than she did, Anne says.
As she reflects yet again on her bewilderment and grief at all that's happened, Violet Mansbridge says: "My greatest hope would be to sit down with Anne and Bill to talk about Lionel; to get that forgiveness from them."
It seems a forlorn hope.
"I will never forgive Binky, " Anne Gutsell says. "I know in my heart she killed my brother."
Nelson Mail
No comments:
Post a Comment