Senior Sergeant Nick Lewer was chasing a man, who was wanted for a string of burglaries, on foot when he heard the sound of a gunshot.

Fearing he would be “shot and killed” the officer stopped and ran back to his patrol car in a zig-zag pattern, to avoid any further potential shots.

The Armed Offenders Squad was called, but Aren Curtis managed to evade police before later being arrested in Hamilton.

Despite suffering no physical harm that day, Lewer told the court this week that the emotional and mental toll on him, his colleagues, and his family, had been significant.

“The thought of being shot in a random driveway at 2.30am in Mt Maunganui led to many sleepless nights at home, with the ‘what ifs’ running through my head,” he said in his victim impact statement.

“For me, I know with the utmost certainty that [Curtis] will kill me or one of my colleagues one day. He has already tried to multiple times and it’s only by sheer luck that he hasn’t carried this out.”

Curtis was today sent to prison for more than five years after being sentenced in the Tauranga District Court.

A police summary of facts said the 34-year-old was spotted driving an Audi A8 with false plates in March 2021, and had warrants out for his arrest.

Police tried to pull the Audi over, but Curtis kept going. The tyres were spiked and he stopped on Seaspray Drive, Mount Maunganui, before taking off on foot.

Sergeant Lewer followed, calling out for Curtis to stop. Then the sound of a gunshot rang out, forcing Lewer to run back to his car in fear he would be hit.

Curtis claims he didn’t have a real firearm. He told police, and maintained in court, that it was a starter pistol.

The Crown, police, and even the judge remained unconvinced, but no evidence was produced to support it being a real firearm, and the Crown agreed to a resolution on the basis it was a starter pistol.

Judge Louis Bidois said he understood the Crown’s reluctance to accept the firearm was a starter pistol.

“Because you effectively achieved your outcome of escaping, that has compromised their ability to prove that the firearm that was discharged was anything other than a starter firearm.”

He said it would not be “very palatable” for the police involved to “accept the word of a hardened criminal.”

Judge Bidois also referred to earlier offending, already dealt with by the court, which revealed that months before the March 2021 incident, police found a loaded firearm along with ammunition in a vehicle Curtis was driving.

“That raises suspicions about the type of firearm that you actually had.”

“And it elevates the concerns that the officer had about your future risk to law enforcement officers.”

However, Judge Bidois said he had to proceed on the basis that it “could not be disproved that the firearm was a starter pistol”.

The Crown had proposed a three-year uplift on a totality basis for the firearms charge, noting the burglary charges were the lead offences in the spree of offending.

The judge noted that was based on it being a “real firearm that could cause a fatal outcome.”

“Given that is not the position now, I accept a lesser starting point is appropriate and that is two years six months.”

That was on top of a starting point of five years’ imprisonment for a string of burglaries and thefts that occurred in the lead-up to the firearm incident.

The raft of charges included six burglaries and two thefts, along with receiving stole property, and unlawfully getting into a motor vehicle.

A crime spree

According to the summary of facts, Curtis began the crime spree when he stole a 2016 Isuzu D Max ute from a commercial premises in Palmerston North in August 2020.

He’d then driven around looking for similar-looking vehicles and eventually found another Isuzu D Max ute, albeit a 2019, and switched out the plates.

He used the stolen ute to commit further burglaries in Hamilton and Mount Maunganui, before stealing $747 worth of petrol, put into three drums, from Caltex Tauriko. He’d attempted to pay for the fuel with a stolen Z Fuel Card, but when it declined he took off.

In September 2020 he went to industrial premises in Hamilton where he took a CCTV hard drive and a large cluster of keys, one of which belonged to a Ford Ranger which Curtis then took.

The Ranger was later found on Hamilton’s Lake Rd, but two of the toolboxes that were in it had been stolen.

A couple of days later he drove to another industrial site in the Isuzu ute, and this time he used a spray to cover the lens of the CCTV camera. He took walkie-talkies, a stereo and tools valued at $3300.

He wasn’t able to find the CCTV footage this time, so he turned on all the taps to flood the premises and make the system inoperable, and smashed all the screens of electronic items - causing $11,000 worth of the damage.

That same day he burgled another commercial yard, taking a television and several boxes.

The Audi A8 he used on March 19, 2021, when he fired the starting pistol, was allegedly stolen from Too Cheap Cars by other offenders and, according to the summary of facts, Curtis got into it unlawfully from an unknown location or person sometime earlier that month. It too had false plates that had been fabricated to match real plates belonging to an identical legal vehicle.

The final charge Curtis faced was one of perverting the course of justice, which related to offending once he was in custody, This related to his attempts to get his former girlfriend to change her witness statement about the firearm, by writing her a letter while he was Springhill Correctional Facility.

An excerpt from the letter, said “So you said, ‘you think you saw a barrell[sic] of a firearm under a white cloth. You can say ‘You’re not 100% sure it was even a barrell[sic] the day your[sic] in the dock against me...”

The final sentence

Crown Solicitor Anna Pollett pointed to there being 10 victims, the high degree of premeditation - which involved the switching of number plates on stolen vehicles - and the attempt to disable security systems at the various locations as being aggravating features.

She also noted Curtis’s significant criminal history which amounted to around 130 previous convictions.

She said the losses from the burglaries and thefts amounted to an estimated $100,000.

Curtis’s lawyer, Bill Nabney, said there was a lack of evidence of the actual total loss, but Judge Bidois said even where there had been property recovered, including the Ford Ranger, it didn’t detract from the scale of the burglaries.

Nabney said his client’s decision to plead guilty had saved the court what could have been a two-three week trial, given the number of charges, and said a 20% discount for guilty plea was therefore appropriate.

He said Curtis’s background, which involved significant abuse and trauma, should also be taken into account, as should his letter of apology which communicated his remorse and an acceptance of the harm caused, particularly to Sergeant Lewer.

The judge criticised Curtis’s decision to send copies of one apology letter to all the victims.

“You’ve had the time to write individual letters relating to the individual offending but you’ve chosen one that has been then photocopied and then sent to victims... but it is still an indication of some remorse.”

The judge acknowledged the difficulties Curtis had experienced and suggested he would need some ongoing intensive support once he’d served his sentence, if he was to turn things around.

The judge began with an overall starting point of eight years and nine months imprisonment, which took into account uplifts for the firearms and perverting the course of justice charges.

He was given a discount of 7% for remorse, 10% for background and 20% for guilty plea.

A six-month uplift was then added for his previous offending.

Curtis received an end sentence of five years and eight months’ imprisonment.

Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.