The trial for a man accused of setting fire to Loafers Lodge, where five people died, is set down to begin today.
Michael Wahrlich, Melvin Parun, Peter O’Sullivan, Kenneth Barnard and Liam Hockings, were all living at the Wellington lodge at the time for the fatal blaze.
The 50-year-old man, who’s been charged with five counts of murder and two counts of arson, has been granted name suppression ahead of the trial in the Wellington High Court.
In the lead up to the trial, survivors have said the building, which remained untouched since the fire, needed to be demolished.
The Wellington City Mission, which still housed three of the survivors, said those who were there at the time were retraumatised every time they walked past it.
The morning’s headlines in 90 seconds, including the trial for a man who set fire to Loafers Lodge begins, Erin Patterson’s back in court, and how dirty is your drink bottle? (Source: 1News)
“The black scars on the building are still there,” said City Missioner Murray Edridge.
“The building just looks worse than it ever did.”
The Wellington City Council said Loafers Lodge was not in danger of collapse and therefore, “the council does not have the power to take over the site or to order the building demolished”.
Edridge acknowledged there would be legal complexities, but he “just doesn’t care”.
“It caused so much hurt and so much grief and it just needs to go and we need to be able to allow people to get on with their lives,” he argued.
Sitting on his couch in his new flat in Wellington, Mark Jones, should’ve been spending his retirement days in Argentina. Instead, he’s on the pursuit for justice.
Every day he thought about that fateful night in May 2023, he said.
“My wife says I’ve changed since the fire,” he said. “I’ve become more withdrawn. I sort of look at it as though I’ve got a lot to think about but she feels that I am more single-minded”.
All his work he said, was not just for him but for those who died, including Liam Hocking who Mark remembered encountering on the balcony just as the fire alarms started.
“I said ‘go on, Liam, go back to bed’. And that was it and he went back to bed and died,” Mark recalled.
Moments like that have had a profound effect on him, and he said he planned to be in court every day.
“I want to get a very, very full idea of what evidence and what information has been found,” he said.
The trial was scheduled to take five weeks.
