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MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010
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How a wild ride from a party ended the lives of five young friends
By LORNA EDWARDS
Stars come out
to aid a cause
TOP Open players set aside
rivalry yesterday to raise
more than $200,000 for survivors of the devastating
Haitian earthquake. Fans
queued at the Rod Laver
Arena for up to five hours
to grab all 15,000 $10 tickets for Hit for Haiti, with
players including world
number ones Roger Federer
and Serena Williams and
Australians Lleyton Hewitt,
Samantha Stosur and Bernard Tomic.
Ironman aims for
finals showdown
HE MAY not have won a
grand slam tournament yet,
but 28-year old Nikolay
Davydenko believes he can
correct that oversight at
this year’s Australian Open.
And he is not alone. Nicknamed ‘‘ironman’’, the
sixth-seeded Russian is the
only man to have twice
beaten Roger Federer and
Rafael Nadal in the same
tournament.
STEVEN Johnstone’s Saturday
night started to go horribly
wrong when gatecrashers
arrived at a party he was
attending.
By 2am, he lay dead by the
side of the road at Mill Park
along with four others. Police
and his friends and family are
still trying to make sense of
what happened in between.
‘‘He was everything,’’ said
Johnstone’s girlfriend of two
years, Natalie Bryant, who was
with him at the party. After the
gatecrashers arrived, she said,
he had decided to move his
high-powered 2007 Ford XR6,
his pride and joy. He climbed in
with his younger half-brother,
Will Te-Whare, 15, and four
other mates, but was quickly
surrounded by five or six men
who tried to get him out.
According to his girlfriend,
Johnstone sped off in anger.
Some gatecrashers ran after him
while others piled into another
car and drove off in pursuit, she
said.
The apprentice roof tiler was
in the car with Will — who
friends say wanted to be a rapper and loved the late US artist
Tupac — and mates Mathew
Lister, 17, Ben Hall, 19, and
Anthony Iannetta, 18, and his
sister, Elissa, 15, the only
survivor.
Police Deputy Commissioner
Ken Lay said Johnstone, 19, had
been seen driving at 150km/h
through Ivanhoe with a passenger hanging out the window.
‘‘The driver was a P-plater,
we believe, he had a prior conviction for a high speed in the
past year — he should not have
had passengers in the car,’’ Mr
Lay said.
‘‘This was an absolute
tragedy waiting to happen.’’
Tony Chahine and his distraught wife thought the same
thing as the Ford passed them
‘‘like a rocket’’ near Hungry
Jack’s on Plenty Road just before
AMONG THE VICTIMS
Steven Johnstone, 19
Mathew Lister, 17
Ben Hall, 19
Anthony Iannetta, 18
Police examine the wreckage of the Ford XR6 at Mill Park early yesterday.
2am. ‘‘I’m shivering as I knew
these boys were going to a death
trap but we could do nothing,’’
said a tearful Mrs Chahine, who
did not want her first name
used. ‘‘We felt the wind of the
car. I’m so sad for these young
people. I feel sorry for the parents.’’ Shortly after the car hur-
tled through the intersection of
Childs Road and Plenty Road at
Mill Park, the driver lost control
and slid off the road into a large
oak tree, the impact splitting the
metre-wide trunk in half.
After hearing what sounded
like a huge explosion, Sam
Dunn and Adam Memery
PICTURE: AAP
looked over their back fence to a
scene of carnage. ‘‘There was no
noise — that was the scariest
part,’’ said Mr Dunn. ‘‘There was
no scream. It was a mess —
there was nothing you could
do.’’
Another neighbour, Ang
Cannon, said: ‘‘We get a lot of
them racing along here on Friday and Saturday nights as it’s
such a straight road — it’s not
the first time there’s been an
accident.’’ .
The three ferried buckets of
water to motorists who had
stopped to help to put out a fire
in the remains of the engine.
Other drivers were still hooning
past the scene with some stopping to film it on their mobile
phones, Ms Dunn said.
After the fire was out, they
could only see the hand and
head of the girl in the back and
could not tell how many had
Continued PAGE 4
INJURED
Elissa Iannetta, 15
SPORT
First blood — now
for the hard part
Pleas for help lost in chaos
Haiti is a disaster like no other: UN
By BEATRIZ LECUMBERRI
PORT-AU-PRINCE
ANOTHER hopeful aiming
to oust Roger Federer is
softly spoken Argentinian
giant Juan Martin del Potro,
who demolished the Swiss
at the 2009 US Open,
notching up his first grand
slam title in the process.
Now del Potro faces a different sort of challenge: the
pressure of success.
SPORT
ANGER is building at Haiti’s UScontrolled main airport, where
aid flights are still being turned
away and poor co-ordination is
leading to a chaotic relief effort
amid the pleas of quake survivors for vital supplies.
Four
days
after
the
7.0-magnitude
earthquake
brought death and misery on an
unprecedented scale to the
impoverished and dysfunctional Caribbean nation, aid was
trickling in but failing to reach
many of those most in need.
‘‘We
have
never
been
confronted with such a disaster
in the UN memory. It is like no
other,’’ said Elisabeth Byrs,
spokeswoman of the UN Office
for the Co-ordination of
Humanitarian Affairs.
US helicopter crews flew in
and unloaded boxes of vital
supplies as huge queues formed
at distribution points where the
UN’s World Food Program
(WFP) handed out high-energy
biscuits.
An AFP journalist saw a US
helicopter dropping half-a-
WEATHER
MELBOURNE Isolated thunderstorms early in
the morning. Scattered showers. South to
south-westerly winds averaging up to 50 km/h
decreasing to 20-35 km/h later in the evening.
Min 13 Max 20
dozen small cartons into a stadium of starving Haitians, some
brandishing machetes as they
fought for the items.
As the fate of whole towns
and villages around the capital
in western Haiti remained
unclear, the United Nations said
it had never before faced such a
humanitarian catastrophe.
The destruction found in the
town of Leogane, just 17 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince,
was staggering — street after
street of homes and businesses
torn apart.
‘‘It’s the very epicentre of the
WATER
TOMORROW Partly cloudy
WEDNESDAY Partly cloudy
THURSDAY Partly cloudy
FRIDAY Partly cloudy
Min 14 Max 23
Min 15 Max 25
Min 16 Max 30
Min 19 Max 30
Details PAGE 17
MELBOURNE DAMS:
earthquake, and many, many
thousands are dead,’’ said WFP
spokesman David Orr. ‘‘The military are talking about 20,000 to
30,000 dead.’’
The latest overall toll from
the Haitian Government is at
least 50,000 people dead and
1.5 million homeless, but those
figures could soar once the full
extent of the tragedy is known.
Early estimates had spoken of
100,000 dead.
The UN said increasing
numbers of Haitians were trying
to cross into the Dominican
Republic, to the east, and reported a surge of quake survivors
fleeing to northern cities. Crammed on to overflowing buses or
on foot, thousands fled the flat-
ODD SPOT
36.7%
THIS TIME LAST YEAR: 34.3%
Police in North Carolina have found a school bus filled
with marijuana plants, buried underground. Officers only
discovered the bus when a search dog fell through a
secret trap door revealing the bus 2.4 metres beneath a
tool shed filled with 68 marijuana plants.
MORE REPORTS
Stalling relief sparks violence
Town the world has forgotten
Millions flow to aid
Hope flickers among ruins
PAGE 7
tened capital where the stench
of decomposing bodies hung in
the air and fears grew of angry
riots.
‘‘The streets smell of death,’’
said Talulum Saint Fils, who sold
her jewellery for one-way bus
tickets for her husband and children out of Port-au-Prince.
There were complaints of
major co-ordination problems
at the US-controlled airport in
Port-au-Prince, the main
destination for aid flights.
French Secretary of State for
Co-operation Alain Joyandet
said he had lodged an official
complaint with the United
States after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned
away. This was later denied by
his own Foreign Ministry.
Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton became the highestranking US official to visit Haiti
since the quake.
‘‘As President [Barack]
Obama has said, we will be here
today, tomorrow and for the
time ahead,’’ she told Haitians.
Despite obvious organisational failures, a significant
INDEX
CLASSIFIEDS
BUSINESSDAY 6
COMMENT & DEBATE
PAGE 11
CROSSWORD SOLUTION PAGE 12
EDITORIALS, LETTERS
PAGE 10
FOCUS
PAGE 9
amount of aid was getting
through, either through Portau-Prince airport, by road from
the Dominican Republic or
from US helicopter flights.
Red Cross co-ordinator
Mauricio Bustamante said the
group had sent 15 plane loads of
personnel and humanitarian
aid, while 19 helicopters made
regular air drops.
But after isolated reports of
machete-wielding gangs terrorising survivors, there were growing signs of unease.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon
confirmed the death of his Haiti
mission chief, Hedi Annabi, as
the organisation faced its
biggest losses with 40 dead and
close to 330 unaccounted for. AFP
ISSN 0312-6307
MINDGAMES
THE ARTS
TRIBUTES
TV & WEATHER
WORLD
PAGE 16
PAGES 12, 13
PAGE 15
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PAGES 7, 8
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