WorkSafe investigator on why roller door fell, killing pastor Helen Verry

This week Lightburn said the installation of the door at Church Unlimited in West Auckland caused it to be “hanging by its fingernails”.

The heavy end of the door was installed with a bracket connected to structural timber through a plywood “packer”.

That packer was used to make sure the door was installed on a straight and even plane.

But the door’s installer, who was a Scotty Doors employee, used 75mm screws through a 13mm packer, which meant that side’s fixings weren’t embedded as much into the wall.

The screws were also placed in a precarious position that led it to not support the door’s weight, Lightburn detailed.

Photos of the door that came to light with the inquest, after the 2024 prosecution, show that the rolled-up door had “slumped” around 200mm down by mid-December 2021, a month-and-a-half before Verry died.

On that evidence, and further investigation, Lightburn believed that by that time, the rolled-up door had failed, was no longer attached, had slumped forward and was jammed into place.

It was possibly caught, and held up, by an adjacent bolt in the wall or the curved lip of the door’s vertical tracks, or both, he reported.

“Effectively just hanging on by its fingernails,” Lightburn repeated.

The inquest also heard that the fuse operating the door had blown prior to Verry’s death.

If Verry pulled on the door’s manual chain in an attempt to roll it down, which had been previously reported, that extra force could have caused the locked-up, failed door to fall.

In the inquest, Church Unlimited has been criticised for its own internal investigation into the fatal accident.

SDL Limited lawyer James Cairney asked Lightburn what the investigator thought of the church board’s internal inquiries into what happened.

“Generally, very poor ... below what I would have expected,” Lightburn answered.

The church staff around the door over that Christmas period told the inquest they had not noticed the slump.

“It was there to be seen if people had looked,” Lightburn pointed out.

Church Unlimited senior pastor Tak Bhana gave evidence on Monday, beginning by offering his condolences to Verry’s grieving husband, who has sat at the front of the inquest throughout.

“Helen was incredibly special; I don’t need to tell you that ... She was loved by the church, dearly loved by the staff, maybe one of the most popular,” Bhana expressed tearfully.

At the start of the inquest, Tim Verry asked why Bhana had not released a public statement on his wife’s death, given he was the church’s “CEO”.

He also asked why the church hadn’t strengthened its health and safety practices in the wake of his wife’s death.

Bhana said before and after the accident his church was “risk adverse” and focused on “continual improvement”.

“We believe we have done our due diligence as this accident shook us to our core,” Bhana said.

Lawyer Katherine Anderson KC, who is assisting the coroner, asked if pastor Kathleen Wollett, who watched the “highly traumatic event”, was the best person to lead the church’s investigation response.

“I thought she was the best person,” Bhana confirmed.

Noticing the door was degrading or needed maintenance was outside the “scope” of their expertise, Bhana explained.

“You really depend on the experts ... that [the door is] structurally sound,” he said.

“You just trust that they put it up [correctly].”

The inquest concludes today.

Ella Scott-Fleming has been a journalist for three years and previously worked at the Otago Daily Times, Gore Ensign and Metro Magazine. She has an interest in court and general reporting. She’s currently based in Auckland covering justice related stories.