The scene was grim when cops got to an Adelaide Hills home on a Sunday afternoon in October 2017.
As they got in the garage, they were confronted with a disorderly scene; two males lay badly injured.
One had suffered a gunshot injury to his abdomen. The other– unnoticed at first– ordinary still under a sheet, with deep gashes to his neck from a blood-soaked tomahawk that was lying close by.
Also present at the scene was a lady, whose love life, it would emerge, was connected to both males.
Warning: This short article contains graphic images
As the two men were stretchered off in ambulances, the police began their investigation.
The extremely next day, prior to either male had actually been interviewed, the cops told reporters that the man who was shot resisted versus the shooter with an axe.
But that assumption was wrong and was declined by a jury after the man who was axed in the neck was charged with attempted murder and later on acquitted
To this day, exactly what occurred because garage that Sunday afternoon remains unresolved.
‘ My child was left horrendously disabled’
” You will always receive grievances, however possibly hardly ever about someone who has been acquitted of all charges.”
So begins a letter sent out recently to South Australia’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) by a troubled female who, for almost 3 years, has fought tooth and nail to clear her son’s name.
The woman’s name is Rohnda Hawtin, and her boy is Jonathon Hawtin.
” Jonathon was bludgeoned consistently with an axe rendering him quadriplegic,” the letter begins.
” My precious child Jonathon is entrusted an horrendous impairment which has actually completely destroyed his lifestyle and made him entirely reliant on 24/ 7 care.”
Mr Hawtin was charged with attempting to murder the man who axed him in the neck– Zacharia Bruckner. He keeps he never shot Mr Bruckner, and that somebody else did, after Mr Bruckner had actually axed him.
In September last year, a jury found Mr Hawtin not guilty.
” He has actually been even more victimised by a trial that could just be thought about a farce and an embarrassment to the stability of your workplace,” Rohnda Hawtin composed to the DPP.
In his able-bodied life, Jonathon Hawtin worked as a plumbing technician and was, for a number of years, the main carer of his two young kids.
The kids’s mother Lisa Lines, who has PhDs in History and Imaginative Writing, is a scholastic editor who established Capstone Modifying.
In a profile published in The Australian in January 2017, Ms Lines paid tribute to Mr Hawtin’s parenting function.
” I have actually needed to sacrifice time with my kids, which is truly hard to do,” she informed the paper. “I’ve had the ability to do it due to the fact that my spouse has stayed home full-time with the kids for the previous 3 years.”
In 2014 Ms Lines used up a position as a lecturer in history in the prominent military history department at UNSW Canberra (Australian Defence Force Academy) and there she fulfilled Zacharia Bruckner, 13 years her junior, who at the time was carrying out an Arts degree at ADFA.
At Mr Hawtin’s trial, Ms Lines said in late 2016 she welcomed Mr Bruckner to work with her in Capstone Modifying and he moved into the family home in Canberra.
In early 2017 he moved with them to South Australia, to the home that Ms Lines and Mr Hawtin bought in Littlehampton in the Adelaide Hills.
By June 2017 Ms Lines and Mr Hawtin split up and in August he left.
” She changed the locks and put all my belongings in a locked garage connected to your house,” Mr Hawtin remembers.
Later that year his own and his household’s lives would unfortunately alter forever.
‘ I want justice’: Who attacked whom?
On the afternoon of October 29, 2017, Jonathon Hawtin arrived at the previous household home with the children who had stayed with him over the weekend. He strolled into the garage with Mr Bruckner.
At some time, Mr Hawtin was struck repeatedly on the back of the neck with a tomahawk.
And