Sara May Ellen Nixon

On Friday, March 22, 1996, Philip Nixon took his beloved seven-year-old Sara for a weekend fishing at Lake Taupo. On Monday, he and Sara were both dead by his hand, leaving a grieving family with only one question on its mind: why? People can speculate on the pressures Philip Nixon faced as the father of a brain-injured child - little Sara had difficulty walking and talking, and needed constant care - but Philip's wife Julie, who found their bodies in a car outside her Wellington home, says she has no answers - not yet, anyway. "It came right out of the blue. There are things that might have been clues but they meant nothing at the time. Like, when they returned from Taupo on Sunday, Phil insisted we watch the trip on TV. Was that a signal of what he had in mind, their last happy moments? Or was he just so excited about the trip that he wanted to share it with us? I don't know." Julie said her husband was a strong man who tended to keep inside himself the pressures he was under. "He didn't open to me, he didn't say enough about how he was feeling. Men don't. I hope one day I will understand what he has done. I think in my heart I do but in my emotions I'm just a bit ... well, I don't know why. "I have written them both a letter. It says the things I wanted to say. It's not just anger, there is so much love in those letters. They are very private words that mean heaps to me. One day, I might share them, but not yet." Julie said she cannot see her husband as someone evil who took her partner of 13 years and eldest daughter away from her. There was, there is, too much love. Whatever motivated him to end his and Sara's lives, she is sure it was for a loving reason. "Phil got so much joy out of his children. He never saw Sara as a burden, he never once wished we hadn't had her." It was Philip who would wake in the night to feed Sara when she was an infant and, as she aged, he was a constant force in her life, giving her every opportunity. Sara was the first Wellington child to participate in a special, but expensive, therapy programme. From that developed the Friends of Brain Injured Children group, which was established near the end of Sara's course, but Philip stayed on to support others. "I found it really hard to keep being involved, " Julie said. "I wanted to try to live a 'normal' life, it's really hard being involved all of the time. But Philip, just a week before he died, was buying some special headphones the kids needed. He got things done." Philip's dedication was noticed by others. Johnsonville School principal Warwick Austin said Philip represented the views of the parents on the school's special education unit management committee and was a regular sight at the school with Sara. "He gave no indication of what drove him to this tragedy. On Friday, he confirmed he would be at the next meeting of the committee and a meeting to work on Sara's individual education programme, meetings he always made a point of attending," Austin said. The coroner ruled Sarah May Ellen Nixon died of carbon monoxide poisoning, unlawfully inflicted upon her by her father Philip Nixon, on March 25, 1996. Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/faces-of-innocents/81344584/faces-...