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I’m not exactly sure where to start with this, because it is just so tragic and there is so much to it. 

I could start by ripping into the people who run Hillmorton Hospital, in Christchurch, for not doing more to try to prevent one of their patients murdering a woman at her home in Mt Pleasant – because I want to rip into them.  

I could start with the thought that ran through my head when more details emerged at Elliot Cameron’s sentencing yesterday for the murder of 83-year-old Faye Phelps, but I’ll come back to that. 

Where I’m going to start is with what the cousin of Elliot Cameron said after the sentencing. Because it doesn’t just relate to this tragic case, it relates to other tragic cases we’ve seen too.  

And it’s all to do with how out-of-kilter things have got when it comes to protecting people’s privacy versus protecting people from danger.  

Alan Cameron is the cousin of the killer, and he is saying that people like Faye, and anyone else this guy did garden work for or had dealings with, should have known that he was a mental health patient living at Hillmorton Hospital. Especially given his threats to kill someone if he was forced him to leave the hospital.  

They should have known that he’d been in mental health care for most of his life.  

Alan Cameron says: “Just shoving people out into the community isn't good enough, without ensuring that there are supports. I feel if more could have been done it might well have made a difference. 

"To protect his privacy they won't involve the family, but he wanted my involvement."  

He says people should have been informed that his cousin was living at Hillmorton because they could’ve then decided whether they wanted anything to do with him.  

He says: "It would have put others on alert to observe him and to keep a note.”  

And I couldn’t agree more.  

Because Faye Phelps had no idea. She was completely in the dark, all in the name of protecting this man’s privacy.  

Just like the probation people couldn’t knock on the doors of people living near that guy who was released from prison and ended up murdering the Colombian woman living next door to him. 

She was in the dark too, because it would have breached that guy’s privacy, as well.  

So when are we going to wake up to the fact that this obsession with privacy is killing people?  

Because there is no way that Elliot Cameron should have been allowed to come and go from Hillmorton and do gardening work for people without those people whose homes he was going to having any idea about him.  

You could say that anyone can ask questions but when you hire someone to do gardening, you ask them about things like their availability, price etc.  

Faye Phelps was never going to ask him if he was mentally unwell, was she? She should have been told. Because, if she had, she might still be alive.  

But we will never know that. Or more importantly, her family and friends will never know that. Either way, Faye Phelps and the people who loved her were let down big time.  

As Faye’s daughter Karen says: “Our family never thought in a million years something like this would happen. The reality is it could be any member of the public next.”  

Which brings me to what went through my head when I saw the reports on the sentencing yesterday. Straight away I wondered how many other patients are walking out the gates at Hillmorton, jumping on buses, and none of us have any idea. 

Faye’s daughter Karen is thinking the same, saying: “Public safety must come first and should always have come first. Sadly, it wasn’t prioritised, and the result is what happened to my mum.”  

As for Hillmorton Hospital – you would think, wouldn’t you, that the people running the place would have learned a thing or two from that tragic case three years ago when one of their patients stabbed a woman to death in broad daylight.  

Maybe they have, but it doesn’t look like it. And they need to learn pretty quick that protecting people’s safety has to come first – even if it means breaching someone’s privacy.  

I think it’s outrageous that Hillmorton Hospital thought it was fine for a guy who repeatedly threatened to kill to come and go as he wanted, and not tell innocent people that their gardener living in mental health care and has been for most of his life.