"An interesting case," Judge Geoffrey Venning had remarked to the jury after they reached their verdict at the trial in July. Slender, pretty, with a sweet demeanour in court, she was found guilty of sending Ewart to his death. Stephen Ewart died after accidentally lighting himself on fire in Mt Roskill in December 2017. A 32-year-old woman was sentenced to eight years and three months imprisonment for arson and manslaughter in the High Court at Auckland on Friday morning. He was there, but it was as though he wasn't there, made invisible in a remarkable piece of criminal law, his actions were viewed as belonging to someone else nowhere near Mt Roskill. He burned to death in agony on that sunny Saturday in summer nearly five years ago. His body stopped growing when he was about 12 and his intellect, too, remained fixed at that age. One neighbour heard him screaming pitifully, another neighbour heard him crying – really, he was a child. He fell to the ground on his side, the knees drawn up. Man on fire, in a crawlspace under the house he blundered into daylight, breathing fire.
The idea was to burn it down or at least cause significant fire damage but he made a terrible hash of it and burst into flames.
Police later found two cigarette lighters on the ground. He crept beneath unit three, put on his headtorch, and poured petrol into 16 plastic bottles of milk. Ewart walked the dark streets for 90 minutes that Friday night on December 9, 2017, to a block of flats that backed on to the wide green fields of Keith Hay Park in Mt Roskill. The flatmate asked what this was about and they said, "Stephen is dead." There was only just enough space on the bed for him to lie down. It wasn't a room: it was a state of mind, a hoarder's mind. His flatmate, another ghost, polished off a cask of wine in a single afternoon when police arrived at their two-bedroom apartment. He was 58 years old and had an address on Queen St. He was a lonely little man whom no one ever noticed, an outsider drifting through the streets of Auckland at all times of day or night, on foot, one of the city's living ghosts – not homeless, not some lowlife drunk or addict. He finished his drink just after 2am in a dark and fairly dingy sports bar with a low ceiling, and set off on his mission. Steve Braunias follows the strange and tragic case of an intellectually impaired loner procured to burn down a house – but who set himself on fire, and died in agony.
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