On March 1st, someone posted photos to the Castle24 Facebook page of a guy sitting on the ground with a bleeding nose, surrounded by police. The post warned others that he’d been on a thieving spree in the neighbourhood before “the cops took him”.
The burglar — who was allegedly midway through some form of blood-ritual in the flat and was described as a “fucked-up vampire” — absconded from the scene before attempting to steal a car from a neighbouring flat. The thief-turned-cultist was eventually caught by the flatties following a foot chase, physical altercation, and a moment of terror when a knife was pulled amidst the carnage.
The incident started with a startling message in the flat’s group chat: “Some dude just robbed us.” It was a shocking message, especially considering five of the flatties were home at the time.
Speaking to Critic Te Ārohi about the experience, Jackson remembers thinking, “Bro, there's five of us in here. What do you mean he robbed us.” After hearing the news, Jackson took the initiative and scoured the area for the burglar.
He eventually found a young adult male sitting in a car, pouring water out of a bottle. Jackson recalled that one of the stolen items had been a Yoda drink bottle, making the mysterious figure in the car immediately suspect. Asking the man about any sightings, the only reply he got was, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” The thief then proceeded to remain sitting in the car, ripping his vape.
After having a brief look through his backpack and finding all of his stuff, Jackson recalls trying to grab the bag. “He sees this, rips it out of my hands, jumps from the car and starts running and I'm like, ‘Fuck, I've got to chase this boy down.’”
Jackson ran after him, eventually catching him in the carpark of Anzac Avenue Mobil — the one across the road from Emerson’s. Managing to grab the bag back, he returned to his flat to go through it to redistribute the stolen belongings. After calling over the neighbouring flat, the thief returned — this time brandishing a knife that was also stolen from one of the neighbouring flats. “He’s telling us that he’ll fucking stab us, how he’ll kill us, and that he’s not from Earth. At that point, we all thought that something wasn’t right.”
After properly going through the bag of stolen items, the group managed to work out that the wannabe Nosferatu had stolen several bottles of wine and some candles (both of which were allegedly sourced from a church). The thief also informed the group that he had eaten “a whole bag of nutmeg” beforehand — usually a spice, but in larger quantities acting as a hallucinogenic.
“So we were like, ‘oh he's fucked,’” said Jackson. “He had also drunk two bottles of wine that he had stolen from the church, he had chugged some of my Hennessy, like he was fucked up.”
After the boys had managed to settle the thief and check the bag’s contents, a policeman arrived on the scene. At this point, the thief allegedly “went ballistic,” with Jackson telling Critic Te Ārohi, “He starts screaming about how he was trying to kill some Christians and trying to murder everyone.” Bold in the presence of a police officer.
Eventually, Jackson sai that a much larger group of police turned up to deal with the situation. Police confirmed to Critic Te Ārohi that they were called to the address just before 3pm, determining that it was a “mental-health related incident.”
After returning to their flat, the boys realised that they hadn’t checked the whole building for missing items and endeavoured to check the rest of the house. “We opened the upstairs bathroom and there were candles everywhere. Two more bottles of wine and a pool of blood were on the floor and we're like, ‘What the fuck?’ One of our flatmates had just had a shower before we came in so we knew that wasn’t there.”
Allegedly, the burglar was under the impression that he was some form of extra-terrestrial vampire. In service of this idea, the individual had taken to gouging into his own arm for the purpose of drinking the blood from it, forcing a police officer to restrain his movement. “We were all terrified because he was cutting himself properly, the cops had to put a glove on and hold his arm together. The entire time he was fighting the cop just so that he could drink his own blood.” Jackson also reported that the thief’s justification for the intrusion was that he was “trying to get blood on his own” because “the supermarket wouldn’t sell him blood because he didn't have money.”
Critic is both worried for this brother, and for the people he meets.