Professor Paul Mullen

There's a small township not far from Dunedin called Aramoana.

And a man went out and started shooting people, killed a number of people, shot dead the local constable who came to try and stop him.

My family, we lived three, four kilometers from where the massacre took place.

So the first thing we knew was the sound of gunfire.

And it's outside of the city.

People shooting rabbits is not all that uncommon.

But it was quite clear the guns being used were not rabbit shooting guns.

This was a military semi-automatic that was being fired.

And I got a phone call from the hospital not long afterwards to tell me there was an incident at Aramoana.

And I had a patient at the time, a lovely woman, very bright, young woman.

And she was the next-door neighbor of this man.

And for some months, she'd been telling me about this man.

She was probably the only person he spoke to.

And she was worried about him, and she somehow wanted to get him treatment.

Looking back, the things she told me now would alert me to the possibility of what was going on.

No, no, I was just a local professor of psychiatry.

First of all, the change in him.

He'd been a sort of vaguely left alternative lifestyler.

He'd become angry, right-wing ideas.

The guns had become a big part of him, and she also worried about him possibly being depressed and suicidal.