Time: Around 12:00 AM
Location: Putorino, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand
Vehicle(s) Involved: Unknown
By TVNZ
"Police have named the four men killed when a four-wheel drive vehicle crashed near Putorino in Hawke's Bay.
They were Jack Huata, 64, and Paul Thomas Parata (known as Boydie), 48, both of Raupunga, and Lou Phillip Wesley, 47 and James Raupita, 42, both of Waihua.
The men lay undiscovered for more than seven hours before locals found them.
When volunteer firefighter Gary Mackintosh, 52, reached the mangled wreckage of the Mitsubishi Pajero, he realised two of the dead were his life-long friends Huata and Parata.
Mackintosh took some comfort from the four bodies looking "quite peaceful".
"It wasn't gruesome or anything like that. There were no horrific injuries."
Headlights from the wreck had been seen by dairy farmer Dianne Torr as she drove through the area at 7.30am yesterday. She raised the alarm.
Police told Mackintosh that the men had probably been dead since about midnight.
The crash contributed to yesterday's rising holiday road toll.
It claimed the lives of farmhands working at Moeangiangi Station - the same station four shearers had been heading home from when they died in a crash in January.
Police believe alcohol was a factor in both crashes.
Mackintosh said the bodies of two of those who died in yesterday's crash were in a paddock, and two in the car.
Huata and Parata were "great, happy-go-lucky buggers" ... They'd never do you any harm, those ones."
Both were employed as general hands at Moeangiangi Station, where they had worked for more than 10 years, and both came from nearby Raupunga.
"I got there, and saw there was nothing we could do. So I searched the gullies just in case there was someone else, who might have been thrown out or crawled away."
The vehicle was a wreck. "One of the cops thought we must have cut the roof off. But we hadn't."
Mackintosh had attended many fatal crashes in more than 15 years as a volunteer firefighter, including the crash near Wairoa in January that killed the four shearers. Yesterday's was one of the worst he had seen.
Police told The Dominion Post yesterday that the men had been drinking at a local pub on Saturday night before the crash.
They could not say if they had been wearing seatbelts.
Torr, a local dairy farmer, said she had stopped after seeing headlights shining from a paddock while she drove to work.
She stumbled across the bodies of two men - men she recognised and spoke to four or five times a week.
"The car lights were still on. I saw a couple of bodies and at that stage I thought I don't need to look any further."
The men were lying face down. "I went up to them but didn't touch them because I knew they were dead."
Police are continuing their investigation into the crash and say they are still trying to establish when it occurred.
Anyone who saw the green-grey Mitsubishi Pajero four-wheel-drive in the Putorino-Raupunga area on Friday night is being asked to contact Napier police on 06 8310700.
Hopes of mirroring the Easter Weekend record road toll of zero were shattered yesterday as the holiday road toll rose to seven."
Source 1
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