It was a shocking and violent end to a mystery that gripped a small nation for years: A fugitive father killed in front of his child, a police officer shot in the head, and two young children found alone at a remote campsite in the wilderness.

The final stanza in the story of Tom Phillips was not how anyone wanted it to end. Not police. Not Phillips’ family. Nor the tiny community of Marokopa – on the rugged West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island – near the campsite, one of many where Phillips and his three children are believed to have been hiding out for almost four years.

His life ended on a rural road in the early hours of Monday morning in a shootout with police, who finally managed to track him down after he was spotted breaking into a store in a small town about an hour away.

One of his three children – Jayda, 12, Maverick, 10 and Ember, 9 – was with him when he died. Their siblings were found hours later, alone at the camp.

Almost everyone in the community is asking the same question: How did it come to this?

The bushland where Tom Phillips’ campsite was found by police on September 8, 2025.
New Zealand Police

The campsite where two of Tom Phillips’ children were found after his death, on September 8, 2025.
New Zealand Police

How it began

It all began with what seemed to be an awful family tragedy on a remote beach on New Zealand’s West Coast.

In September 2021, a pickup truck belonging to Phillips was found below the tideline on Kiritehere Beach, near Marokopa in the Waikato region.

The children’s car seats were strapped in the back of the truck, and the keys had been left under the driver’s floor mat. But the tide was coming in and the locals thought it strange that Phillips would leave his truck for the surf to take.

Kiritehere is a black sand beach, wild and prone to powerful swells that amateur surfers dare not attempt. Fears quickly grew that the family might have been washed away by the fearsome sea.

This sparsely inhabited spot, at the time, out of range of cellphones, suddenly became a hive of activity.

Teams of searchers combed the shoreline on foot and in inflatable boats.

When the stormy weather allowed, helicopters, drones and fixed-wing planes flew overhead, using thermal imaging to search the coastline for signs of life. They found few clues.

Phillips knew this coastline well and was known to be an experienced outdoorsman. If it wasn’t the sea to blame, misadventure seemed implausible. Something didn’t add up.

Almost a week later, police said they wanted to know the whereabouts of two motorbikes that Phillips once owned – the first official hint there might be more to their disappearance. Then, came a sighting of a man and children on a motorbike on a rural road in the area, in the early hours of the morning.

A day later, 17 days after they vanished, Phillips, Jayda, Maverick and Ember walked in the door at the family farm, not too far from Marokopa.

Police revealed they had been camping in the bush 15 kilometers (9 miles) south of the beach where the truck was left.

The search had cost emergency services hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Phillips was soon charged with wasting police time.

Five days before Christmas that year, Phillips and the children disappeared again. But this time no search was initiated.

Maybe he’d just come back?

But when he didn’t show up for his court appearance on January 12, 2022, an arrest warrant was finally issued for him.

Over the next 1,358 days, there would be just a handful of sightings of Phillips, mostly connected with petty crimes in nearby small towns. But one was serious; he was alleged to have robbed a bank with another person, thought to be his eldest daughter.

Two families living a nightmare

The ordeal has devastated two families already separated by a relationship breakdown: Phillips’ tightknit farming family, who live near Marokopa, and the family of children’s mother, who goes by the name of Cat.

Following the news of Phillips’ death, Cat told CNN affiliate RNZ that she was saddened by what had happened, but also “deeply relieved” for her children that it was over.

Cat, the mother of missing children, Jayda, Maverick, and Ember.
New Zealand Police

As his son’s body lay on the road where he had been killed, Phillips’ grieving father told a journalist from New Zealand news outlet Stuff that the family had been “shafted” by police “several times.” The family has been emphatic over the years that they haven’t been helping Phillips.

For each of the four Christmases that passed while they were missing, Phillips’ sister Rozzi Phillips placed gifts with Jayda, Maverick and Ember’s names on them under her Christmas tree – hoping they would walk in the door again.

“There’s no day that goes by that I don’t think about all four of them,” Rozzi told New Zealand journalist Paddy Gower in an interview last month.

She read a letter Phillips’ mom had written, pleading for him and the kids to return. “Every day I wake up and hope that today will be the day that you come home,” it said.

Who will look after the children long-term is not clear. The state agency that cares for children, Oranga Tamariki, said Tuesday they had been “settled” Monday night in the care of authorities.

The detective leading the case told the New Zealand Herald in 2024 that he believed custody of the children may have been Phillips’ motivation for running the second time.

A tiny community at the center of a global story

If New Zealand lies at the ends of the earth, then Marokopa is the back end of nowhere.

“It’s the quiet, I think that’s what people like,” said Gayle Keegan, one of Marokopa’s 19 permanent residents. “It’s very remote, but it’s beautiful.”

There are no shops, many of the roads are gravel, and there was no internet until just a few years ago.

Kiritehere Beach, where Phillips’ truck was found, is just down the road. His family’s farm is not far away, nor is the campsite where the children were found.

“I think at the moment, everybody is just flat. This isn’t how they wanted it to happen,” Keegan told CNN. “I think everybody lived with the idea that suddenly he’d come out.”

Marokopa is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, and they look after each other.

But the tiny community has had to endure a lot in recent years: regular checkpoints, an influx of police and journalists every time there was a sighting of Phillips, and the lingering suspicion that one of them could have been helping him out.

“You’d go into town, and everybody goes: ‘Oh, Marokopa. Where’s Tom’?”

“And they just assumed just because you’re from there, you knew … which was horrible,” said Keegan.

The landscape is wild: steep, hilly and deeply forested in parts. It’s a place where the bushland stays wet for days after the rain, according to Keegan.

“You really have to know the bush, because it’s quite frightening. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to survive in the bush,” she said.

People regularly go hunting in the area for wild pigs and deer.

A teenage hunter filmed four people believed to be Tom Phillips and his children on October 3, 2024. John McOviney

The closest-to-concrete sighting in the area was in October last year, when hunters filmed a man and three children in wet-weather gear, with camouflaged backpacks, hiking across a remote field slightly inland from Marokopa.

But that was it. No one seemed to be able to find any trace of a campsite. No trash left behind and no obvious tracks, according to Keegan.

Phillips was a skilled bushman. He grew up pig hunting in the area with his father.

He knew this land, and he knew how to hide.

He also had supplies to set up campsites, police said, after he was sighted by the children’s mother at a hardware store, using cash to buy headlamps, batteries, seedlings, buckets and wellingtons in August 2023.

Police released video purportedly of Tom Phillips shopping at a hardware store in August, 2023. Waikato Police

A stolen truck he’d driven to pick up the supplies was found by police in the Marokopa area that same month. But they couldn’t find Phillips nor his children.

How he was caught

Around 2.30 a.m. Monday morning, police received a tip-off that a man and a child wearing headlamps were breaking into a farm supplies store in Piopio, a town of fewer than 500 people, over an hour’s drive from Marokopa.

Police spotted an all-terrain farm vehicle with two people on it making off down a gravel road that led back towards Marokopa. They gave chase.

Phillips’ chosen escape route gave police time to place road spikes further up the road. It wasn’t long after he ran over them and came to a stop that the gunfire began.

As a police officer, who had arrived at the scene, was climbing out of his car, Phillips shot him in the head at close range with a high-powered rifle. Injured, the officer took cover in his car, which was riddled with a “large number” of bullet holes, said police.

And when a second officer turned up seconds later, they shot Phillips, killing him.

Police officers and locals stand near a roadblock where a police shootout occurred near the town of Piopio, located in New Zealand’s Waikato region on September 8, 2025.
DJ Mills/AFP/Getty Images

The rural constable spent much of Monday undergoing surgery for injuries to his head and shoulders. He has “a long road ahead,” said Police Commissioner Richard Chambers Tuesday.

It was only information from the child with Phillips that led police to find the remote campsite, roughly two kilometers (1.2 miles) away, where his other two children were waiting for the return of their father and sibling.

Police knew there was a firearm and ammunition at the campsite, so specialist negotiators were sent in to the “very remote” location to speak with the children and had armed special tactics teams on standby.

“These young children have spent the last four years in the bush, and I suspect were very good at being able to live in those environments, so we needed to be very careful,” said Chambers.

They were alone, “well and uninjured,” said police.

A firearm was indeed found at the campsite and there was a “fairly mobile” structure, police revealed, but it was clear they hadn’t been there long.

Phillips’ death was “devastating news” for the close-knit community, many of whom knew the Phillips family personally, said Waitomo mayor John Robertson.

“This one was the downfall for him,” Robertson told CNN, referring to the burglary – the second attributed to Phillips in Piopio in a matter of weeks.

In late August, Police released security camera footage of Phillips and one of the children using an angle grinder to break into a cooler outside a convenience store.

All they took was milk, the store owner told local media. But the fact Phillips needed supplies at all came somewhat as a surprise, given he had been lying low for the best part of a year.

There had been an earlier attempt to break into a store in the same small town in 2023.

Police suspect Tom Phillips and a child of breaking a shop window in November 2023. Waikato Police

And an alleged bank robbery that year in Te Kuiti, a town nearby, where two people walked into the bank and demanded cash, police said. An image released showed a man and smaller person, both dressed in black, fleeing the scene on a motorbike.

There were also rumors of things going missing from farm sheds, and animals being butchered for their meat overnight in farmers’ paddocks.

Anything that went awry in the area seemed to inevitably lead to suspicion that Phillips might be involved.

Mostly, it was just people joining invisible dots, the mayor said.

Was he being helped?

Over the years, police have repeatedly said it was possible Phillips was being helped by people in the area, secretly giving them food, or vital supplies. That will form part of their ongoing investigation in the wake of his death, police said.

Phillips had a “stockpile of firearms,” said the police commissioner. Now, investigators are trying to work out where they came from and whether anyone had been helping to supply them.

While police said Phillips and the kids had frequently moved campsites, Robertson, the mayor, said many in the community found it hard to believe they were camping out this entire time.

“I think the discussions around here have been: ‘Gosh, is he really surviving in the bush? Is he being looked after? Is he in a house or a cabin somewhere?’”

In winter, the region is very wet, and the ground temperature is below freezing point for almost 50 days of the year.

There were some places he could plausibly have hidden for short periods: sheds on the far side of farms or rarely used holiday homes. Though there was no evidence to link them to places like that.

While Robertson doubts locals were helping Phillips out, he admits there are some in the community who took the view that Phillips was just a dad trying to do the best for his kids.

In the hours after Phillips’ death, comments echoing that view and supporting his actions started appearing on social media.

It prompted a pointed message from Chambers, the police commissioner: “No one who does this to children, no one who unleashes high powered rifles on my staff is a hero.”

Everyone wanted the saga to come to an end, just not like this.

“It’s just gone on too long and the children will be hugely impacted,” said Robertson. “The biggest worry in the community around New Zealand is about whether the children can come through this?”

Phillips’ survival skills may have kept his children alive for the past four years, but they now leave the wilderness to return to a very different kind of life.