One of Tom Phillips’ children reportedly held a rifle at police after they were found in a campsite in the remote New Zealand bush – after going missing with their dad for more than three years.
According to the New Zealand Herald, police found 10-year-old Maverick Phillips clutching a rifle – but they convinced him to put it down.
‘There was a negotiation which commenced with the children, and that proceeded, and they came out,’ Detective Senior Sergeant Andrew Saunders said.
Police Commissioner Richard Chambers said the negotiators were ‘very highly trained and skilled’.
Phillips’ daugthter Jayda helped police find the campsite where the siblings were hiding – and reportedly told police their were guns at the site.
‘We had information to say a firearm was present [at the campsite] and there was,’ he said.
Jayda was present when he was killed in a roadside shootout near the rural town of Piopio, in New Zealand’s Waikato region, after police intercepted him and Jayda on a quad bike following an armed farm supply store robbery.
When officers deployed road spikes, Phillips opened fire at close range, shooting one officer in the head and leaving him with critical injuries.
Police will now try to ‘put the puzzle together’ of how the family lived, found food and avoided detection by searchers for so many years.
Photos supplied by the police of the family’s final campsite, where soda cans, tires and a metal container sat amid camouflaged belongings, gave few clues. The site was likely a temporary one, officials said, but it was in terrain that had been searched before.
‘It’s highly likely that we’ve been very, very close,’ New Zealand’s Police Commissioner Richard Chambers told reporters.
Tom Phillips’ quad bike was stocked with animal food when it was towed away by police on Tuesday
Ember, nine, Maverick, 10, and Jayda, 12, are currently in the care of authorities after spending almost four years on the run with their father, who was shot dead on Monday
‘If not right there.’
Investigators always believed that since Phillips disappeared in December 2021, he and his children had never traveled far from the tiny rural settlement where they lived in the sprawling farming region of Waikato.
But despite the offer of a sizeable reward, no one turned them in.
On Tuesday Chambers said officers would seek to uncover the identities of ‘anybody who may have been helping Mr Phillips’.
The fugitive father was skilled in wilderness survival. But as law enforcement increased patrols in the area, the police were increasingly sure he had help remaining concealed.
The case divided New Zealand and Phillips found supporters online and among residents of the settlement of Marokopa, population 40, where he had lived. Some locals told visiting reporters that they endorsed his actions.
‘I can tell you he is no hero,’ Chambers said Tuesday. ‘No one who does this to children, no one who unleashes high-powered rifles on my staff, is a hero, simple as that.’
December 2021 wasn’t the first time Phillips and his children had vanished. Three months earlier, he sparked a massive search operation when his truck was found on a beach near his home, with no trace of the family.
Police released photos of the family’s main campsite on Wednesday
A shelter was constructed using tree branches and tarp
Items found at the site include gas bottles, drinks, and cooking equipment
Officials feared they had been swept out to sea before Phillips and the children emerged from the forest after 17 days, saying they had been camping. Phillips was charged with wasting police resources but disappeared again with the children before he was due to appear in court.
Phillips didn’t have legal custody of his children at the time he vanished. He was later wanted for an armed bank robbery in 2023, during which he was accompanied by one of his children and apparently shot at a member of the public as he fled.
He was spotted on CCTV footage in the area committing other break-ins to steal supplies, most recently in August. Beyond those thefts, it wasn’t clear how the family had survived in rugged countryside at freezing winter temperatures for years.
Officials didn’t disclose Tuesday any details of the children’s whereabouts after their rescue. The child protective services agency was involved.
‘There’s a careful plan with everyone becoming involved at the right time in terms of making sure that they’re put on a really strong and healthy pathway to recovery,’ New Zealand’s Police Minister Mark Mitchell told reporters.
A High Court judge on Monday issued a temporary injunction that bars officials or news outlets from disclosing certain details of the case.
‘They have seen and been exposed to things that children in our country should not be,’ Mitchell said. ‘It’s very complicated and it’s very complex and it has been for quite some time.’
