News exclusive Halayna was the light of any family gathering.
Above: Halayna at age 16, teaching her dad to take selfies.
The victim
Grieving dad s HALAYNA SHOULD ST Losing his daughter and her unborn child to violence has ripped Darren’s family apart wo minutes before she lost her life, pregnant teenager Halayna Wagstaff desperately tried to escape the vice-like grip of her boyfriend. The 17-year-old, urged by others to take her partner Jason Anaru-Emery home from a party, had already been attacked by him earlier in the evening. He’d grabbed her by her neck and thrown her around a room in front of others. Now parked up on the main street of Te Puke, the athletic teen made a desperate dash for freedom, opening her car door and running away from the father of her unborn child, only to be caught and dragged back into the front seat. According to evidence given in the Hamilton High Court,
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Woman’s Day
no-one can be sure who was behind the wheel that winter’s night two years ago when the car sped out of the small Bay of Plenty township so fast it shook an oncoming van. But 90 seconds later it had careened out of control, smashing into a metal guard rail of a bridge on the outskirts of town before going down a bank, only stopping when it hit a concrete power pole. Halayna’s injuries were unsurvivable, her heart bursting the moment her body struck the dashboard. It’s those last tragic minutes of her life that grieving father Darren Wagstaff, 47, would give anything to have saved his daughter from. He’s talked to a mate who saw
the couple’s car drive erratically along the main road, and even forced himself to watch the gut-wrenching footage of the deadly smash. “I hit the bottle for three days,” the dad-of-six admits. Darren is a man with a broken heart, wishing desperately his strong and stubborn middle daughter with a phenomenal smile had confided in him before she paid the ultimate price. In the 18 months following her death, he claims many knew Halayna had suffered at the hands of her boyfriend. And he wishes the abuse she suffered had not been shrouded in secrecy. “This code that your friends know but don’t tell ... Friends need to tell because that’s being a true friend,” he insists. “If you know there’s violence, then don’t hold that code of silence. “I understand the code of silence in friendship, but there are times things just really, really need to be spoken about.” It’s been a difficult time for the
Tauranga rugby league stalwart – he’s faced a marriage break-up, financial hardship, the death of a grandchild at birth and now he’s coming to terms with the tragic loss of Halayna. Trying to make sense of why his newly pregnant daughter, her sister and her friends kept quiet about what he now believes was an increasingly violent relationship, he acknowledges there were tell-tale signs, but any attempt to address the issue was rebuffed by his daughter. “I don’t think the violence was right from the start but came a few months in,” alleges Darren. “I had a suspicion after three or four months and I even talked to her about it. She said, ‘Dad, you know I can deal with it myself,’ but he must have broken her. “She had bruises on her arms that I knew were not normal bruises. Her sister told me that Jason had punched her in the arm. People are still too scared to tell me everything, so I’m still finding things out slowly.”
