Neville Capes and Suzanne Brewer were travelling along a quiet rural road late one night in February 1982 when suddenly they saw a car's headlights right in front of them. "Shit!", Capes was heard saying, before the two vehicles crashed into each other, head-on, with such force it ejected the 17-year-old out the back window. He suffered fatal injuries and died in hospital.
Brewer, who was 16 at the time and in the passenger seat, was thrown around inside Capes' red Ford Escort as it tumbled, bonnet over boot, for about 100m down Otaua Road, in Waiuku. She was knocked out but survived after being pulled out of the vehicle. The crash was more than 40 years ago, and Brewer, now a 65-year-old nurse, had moved on with her life.
But then she saw a photo of the driver of the offending car, Peter James Napier, in a copy of the NZ Herald . Napier, also known as Peter Nepia, was back before the courts after killing another innocent person while behind the wheel. In June he was jailed for two years and three months on a charge of driving at a dangerous speed and hitting 28-year-old pedestrian Shiqing Li as she tried to cross Boundary Road in Hamilton on 30 March, 2022.
The Waikato University student was thrown 24 metres and died in hospital leaving behind a grieving family. Napier's lawyer Shayne Lawrey, told sentencing Judge Glen Marshall that the 61-year-old hadn't driven since the crash, and was "highly likely" to never get behind the wheel again. "Speaking openly [to me] today, he s.