He was ordered to leave as they searched Tarrant’s home for explosives.įorty-nine people already lay dead in Christchurch, with another 51 injured. One moment he was alone with his thoughts, the next officers from the Special Tactics Group were there, clad in black body armour and helmets, their faces hidden by masks, assault rifles gripped in their gloved hands. It might as well have been an alien visitation. A neighbour recalls how they appeared as he was enjoying a smoke on his front porch in the early autumn dusk. The police had first arrived at the property the previous Friday, just hours after the March 15 gunfire ceased. Good Weekend editor's letter: why we published this story.This article is one of the most-read Good Weekend features for 2019.The police had already secured as evidence most of the other possessions the 28-year-old Australian had brought with him when he moved across the Tasman 18 months prior. A local contractor carted it off in a single load, with instructions from New Zealand Police that none of it be sold or used. A toaster and a worn vinyl computer chair.Ī week after his shooting spree in Christchurch, the material total of Brenton Tarrant’s New Zealand life was dumped into a caged trailer outside his unremarkable rented home in Dunedin on the country’s South Island. A bottle of Steinlager and a family pack of Bluebird potato chips. In the end, it came down to this: a mattress and a black bookshelf, a colander and a dish rack, a few battered suitcases and a broken electric fan.

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