Tom Phillips vanished into dense back-country with six-year-old Ember, seven-year-old Maverick and eight-year-old Jayda in December 2021, skipping court dates and slipping every police dragnet. On 8 September 2025 trackers cornered the family near remote Waitomo; gunfire erupted, the 45-year-old father was killed and an officer was rushed to surgery, while the children were found unharmed two kilometres away, exhausted but breathing.
The siege closes a case that gripped the nation: CCTV images of a father-and-child store burglary in August, a mother’s on-air pleas for her “bush-builder” son, and whispers that locals may have supplied their hidden camp. Forensic teams now comb the rough terrain, relatives collect the children, and investigators face the long task of piecing together how four fugitives survived winters, evaded helicopters and what secrets died with the man who chose the wild over a courtroom.
Police thought they were hunting an armed absconder; what they found was a father who turned survival into an obsession and children who lived four years without school, doctors or daylight friends. The questions left—who helped, who knew, who will heal the kids—are the final chapter of a manhunt that ended in gun-smoke and tears on a forest floor.