It was an ordinary winter shift in Counties Manukau. Nothing about it suggested it would be the one that left two police officers thinking they might never make it home.

When Constable Friederike (Fritzi) Faber and Sergeant Richard Bracey stepped into a locked garage in Clover Park last July, both thought it could be their last day.

“I definitely haven’t been in a situation where I thought I might actually die in here,” Friederike says. “That thought definitely crossed my mind that day. It was a pretty dire situation.”

Richard felt the same. “That was probably, for me – and I’ve been in a long time – the closest I’ve come to thinking, ‘I don’t know if we’ll get out of this one’.”

‘Alarm bells went off’

It began as a general family harm incident – one of those routine but unpredictable callouts that frontline police know can change in a second.

Friederike had picked up the incident while scanning the jobs up for grabs. “When I'm passenger in the car, I always like to just browse to see what jobs are available,” she says. “If there's anything that I find interesting I self-assign. And this was one of those cases where I just thought, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting’, because it was an overseas informant who called it in.”

The online report came from one of the victim’s adult children overseas. “She said her mum is elderly and her partner has been really controlling over her, not allowing her to talk to the kids,” Friederike says. “I thought, ‘Well, it must be significant enough for an adult child overseas to reach out to New Zealand Police.”

When Friederike and her partner found the woman outside her home, things escalated quickly. “The more she talked about her partner, the more the alarm bells went off in my head, and the more concerned I became,” she says.

At first, the woman described visa issues and relationship strain, but the conversation soon darkened. “Then the longer we talked, the more things came to light… [she said] he made some mention of wanting to burn her or strangle her, and I just thought, ‘OK, we have to do something about this’.”

It was enough to justify a Police Safety Order, which was served through a window because the man had barricaded himself inside the house.

“He’d turned the power off so that the electronic opening system for the garage didn't even work,” Friederike says. “You couldn't actually get to the front door. There was a pretty high fence around the property, and the fence gate was locked from the inside with a padlock, so the only way to get in and out of the house was through this electronic garage door. I didn't like that at all.”

‘My shoes were on fire’

She wasn’t going to leave the victim standing in her driveway. “It made me pretty angry that he was treating her this way,” Friederike says. 

“She was begging him to come outside and resolve the situation. He continued to refuse. I got the feeling we might have to use some force to get him out. That’s when we contacted other units for assistance, and that's how Sergeant Bracey ended up there.”

“He was still refusing to acknowledge this notice,” Richard says, “even though he had it in his hand.”

Friederike and Richard hopped over a back fence where she spotted an open bathroom window. “So I jumped through the window, and then Bracey climbed in right after me,” she says.

Inside, the agitated man appeared in the hallway waving fishing rods, shouting, and retreated into the garage.

“I pushed the internal door open and he came at me with a large fishing rod, trying to cut me with it,” Richard says. “He dropped that and picked up a Honda petrol-fuelled generator and just looked at me with a ‘I don't give a s*** about you’ look and started tipping it all over the place.”

Petrol splashed across the concrete floor.

“I yelled out to Fritzi, ‘Get out of here!’ but she was still beside me when I tackled him and drove him straight into that main garage door. He dropped to the ground, dropped the generator, but then he somehow managed to find a lighter,” he says. 

Friederike remembers the smell of petrol filling the air. “S*** really hit the fan when I just heard ‘Friederike, he's got a lighter, and there's petrol everywhere. He’s trying to start a fire. Get out’. Then we were tussling, and I saw him holding the lighter. In my head, I thought, ‘If this lighter ignites the petrol, we’ll be toast.’”

Then it did.

“The whole floor of the garage just went up in flames,” Richard says. “My shoes were on fire, the rubber soles, flames were up over my knees, sometimes waist height.” 

Friederike looked down to see her own boots burning. “There were parts of the garage where the flames were probably as high as me. There was a little fuel canister right at my feet and I just remember thinking, ‘You know, if this catches fire, it will blow up in my face.’ 

“The smoke was building pretty quickly, it was getting hard to breathe and the fire alarm went off. It was really a sensory overload… your brain just trying to compute and come up with some sort of solution. It was pretty scary.”

‘I’m not leaving you'

With the garage engulfed and the power cut, there was no way out. 

“I tried smashing him through the roller door to get him through it but I only buckled it a little bit,” Richard says. “I had two officers at a single door as the back of the garage, and I was yelling at them to smash that door.”

A constable punched through the safety glass, cutting his arm badly in the process but creating a way out. The offender was hauled outside and Richard picked up the generator while it was on fire and threw it out the door. He began hurling any burning debris he could into the garden.

“I just remember saying to him, ‘Just leave it, just come outside with me’, because the flames were so high,” Friederike says. “But there’s no way I’m leaving Richard inside… he can't stay in there. That was my main emotion, just worrying for him.”

Instead, she ran into a bedroom, grabbed blankets and threw them over burning patches to suffocate them. Richard then found a tap in the garage and they both filled anything they could find with water to throw on the flames.

“I don’t know why we continued to put the garage out. In your mind you think you've got to save the house or something. And we did. We got the fire out.”

When it was over, the fire brigade took over and police took the offender was taken away. Only then did the enormity of what had happened sink in.

Both officers inhaled smoke but avoided serious injury. “I threw my boots away,” Richard says. “They were soft and melted, but nothing happened to my feet, which was great. They saved my feet being burnt.”

The colleague who smashed the glass door was treated for a deep cut.

‘It escalated so quickly’

Later, it was found that the man had poured petrol around all the home’s exit points. 

“He had also set that garage up,” Richard says. “He had large fuel cans in and around different areas of the garage. So he was going to, I believe, end up burning their garage and the whole house down. That's why he locked it. He was setting up to take the whole thing down.”

For Richard, the incident was a reminder that even routine callouts can turn catastrophic. “You can never predict any job, and you can never be complacent,” he says.

Friederike agrees: “[I’ve never been to anything] where things escalated so quickly, like it did in this situation,” Friederike says. “The male involved, he had no significant history, no safety flags… It just shows how you never know what a situation might turn into.”

And, while time has passed, some memories linger. 

For Richard, it is a moment at the height of the commotion: “I looked at Fritzi, I could see she's just calling out, ‘Sarge. Sarge’. I can see the tears coming down her face. I saw that for a long time. So that upset me. And the other officers who were there that I speak to now are so shaken by what happened.”

Friederike says she tries to joke about the events of that day. “Everyone’s got their own coping mechanism. I’ve got a pretty dark sense of humour, so that has helped me a lot in dealing with it.”

She says the support afterwards was immense. “It was really nice to just be with my partner afterwards and debrief the whole thing. It was probably worse for him than it was for me to be honest. I just try to laugh about it. If you don’t laugh, you cry.”

‘I still love my job’

Friederike didn’t even know she’d been nominated for the Bravery Award. “It really came out of the blue. I had no idea that this went anywhere.” 

When Police Association President Chris Cahill messaged her while she was on holiday in Portugal, she thought it was a scam. “I thought, this is 100% a scam. I did a bit of a background search... and then verified this is his actual phone number,” she laughs.

For her, it was a special moment to celebrate with her partner and his parents. “We’re really close, because my family all lives in Germany,” she says. “It was really nice to have something joyous to celebrate a little bit.”

Richard says he finds the recognition “quite embarrassing”. “I was back at work the next day. Did I tell my wife exactly what happened? No. It took me getting the phone call that I was getting an award.”

Still, he’s proud. “I love my job, it is important to me. I’m so proud to be general duties frontline I'll never come off this, because we get there first.”

Friederike feels the same. “I’ve been on frontline for nearly four years, and I still love it. I still like coming to work every day. There’s no other job like it.”