Cantabrians Sammi Holland and Brodie Green are also dismayed about the police handling of their complaint about Isaac MacDonald-Maynard, 24, who was sentenced in the Queenstown District Court last week in relation to the incident in the Otago mountain range two years ago.
MacDonald-Maynard was convicted on charges of discharging a firearm in a public place and unlawfully possessing a firearm after licence revocation, and sentenced to 75 hours’ community work.
Mrs Holland said she and her husband James went hunting with MacDonald-Maynard in the Remarkables in 2021, about a year before the incident.
They had known him socially for about a year, but cut ties with him as a result of his behaviour on the trip, Mrs Holland said.
However, a year later, the couple and Mr Green, a close friend, had a chance encounter with him during a multi-day hunting trip in the same area.
While returning to their camp on March 31, 2022, they heard a man "screaming at the top of their lungs" from a ridgeline several hundred metres away, Mr Green said.
As they kept walking towards their camp, a shot rang out, causing Mrs Holland to "collapse in fear".
"We got Sammi off the ground and got behind a big rock as soon as we could."
After waiting behind the rock for about 15 minutes, they ran about 150m over a ridge and out of sight.
Mr Green, a taxidermist, said from his experience of hunting and firearms, he had no doubt the shot was fired "directly over the top of us".
Sheltering behind the rock, waiting for another shot, was a "pretty f...ing terrifying experience", he said.
They spent the rest of the day in camp, on edge, wondering if MacDonald-Maynard would confront them again.
They reported the incident to police immediately after the trip.
Police say MacDonald-Maynard, who was guiding some hunters and carrying his own rifle despite having his licence revoked, became "enraged" after seeing the group.
Claiming he had shown the couple the location the year before, he was angry to see them hunting there.
In court, he claimed to have fired the shot into the ground, near his feet, to alert the group to his own party’s presence, and did not intend to frighten or intimidate them.
Judge Russell Walker, who noted MacDonald-Maynard’s seven previous convictions and extensive demerit history, refused his application for a discharge without conviction, and told him "you don’t appear to regard rules as applying to you".
However, Mr Green said after waiting two years for the outcome, they were shocked by the lightness of the sentence and how their complaint had been handled by police.
"It was a serious firearms incident, but their attitude was ‘we’ll catch up with him when we catch up with him’."
After MacDonald-Maynard was finally arrested, initial more serious charges were downgraded, witness statements made by his clients appeared to be given little weight, and Mr Green and the couple were not asked to make victim impact statements — in which victims can explain to a judge how a crime has affected their lives.
Mrs Holland said they received at least a dozen threatening messages from MacDonald-Maynard after the incident — screenshots of which they sent to police — but nothing was done.
"He told me to watch my back — lots of nasty things."
She remained "petrified" of him, and had struggled to put the experience behind her.
"We’ve all had our lives so affected, and he gets a slap on the wrists."
Mr Green said MacDonald-Maynard had put false information about the incident on social media, and rumours had gone around the hunting community.
They had contacted the Otago Daily Times out of concern young people getting into hunting would read about the incident and "think it’s OK to fire at someone".
"We wanted the courts to deal with it and the truth to come out when he was sentenced, but it didn’t really.
"It was painted as if he was the victim."
He emphasised they had not broken any unwritten hunters’ code in being where they were, which was a public conservation area popular with many hunters.
"If someone has a honey hole they go back to all the time, it’s their little spot and they’ve taken you there on a hunt, you don’t go back.
"This is not even close to being in that category."
