Gunned down in a suburban street in a sudden, unprovoked attack by a stranger, a Rotorua man has slowly been recovering from his wounds.

But the mental scars may take longer to heal. Stuff's national correspondent Tony Wall reports.

It had been a fun Saturday night at a bar in downtown Rotorua – a few beers, a few laughs – but it was time to call it quits. Paul called a cab for he and his long-term partner, Jane, who fell asleep in the back during the ride home.

They were dropped off near the Skyline gondola complex on Fairy Springs Rd, the main route into Rotorua from the north, some time after midnight on September 27, 2020.

Paul, 52 at the time, didn't know it, but his life was about to be shattered by a sickening act of random violence. (He and Jane asked that their surnames be withheld and their faces not shown for their safety.)

As they arrived at the footpath on the other side of the four-lane road, Jane stumbled on the kerb.

'I went to help her up, and when we spun round there was a guy there just going off,” Paul recalls. 'I didn't see where he came from, or how he got there.”

They would later learn that the 17-year-old was a passenger in a car and had told the driver to pull over when he saw the couple. He was from a gang background, and had a gun, which he kept hidden.

'He was saying ‘you're beating her up, you're f...ing beating her up',” Paul says. 'I said ‘no bro, no'. But he kept on going. He was wild, angry. I just said ‘no, leave us alone, go away'.”

The youth kept pacing backwards and forwards and had one hand behind his back.

'I remember Jane saying, ‘this is really bad, he's not going away'.”

The next thing Paul knew, he was on the ground.

'I don't remember hearing a shot. I dropped like a sack of spuds. I knew straight away what had happened – I said to Jane, ‘he's shot me'. She said ‘no he hasn't'. I said ‘he has'.”

The gunman fled immediately.

'I'm sitting down and my left leg is at right angles from mid-thigh, folded across my right leg. I thought ‘my bone. It's snapped my bone'. I grabbed my calf and just sort of ... dragged it across and put it straight.”

Jane was in disbelief. 'I watched him pick his leg up. You could see his jeans had filled out with blood.”

She couldn't find her phone, so Paul used his to call 111. 'I said ‘I need an ambulance, I've been shot'. They asked if I had a tourniquet. I had a belt, so I removed that and put it around my leg, and we sat there waiting.”

Paul was taken to Rotorua Hospital, while police took Jane back to the station for questioning, 'to make sure I hadn't arranged [the shooting]. They wanted my phone ... they kept my handbag for the weekend”.

It didn't take long to find the offender; the incident was caught on three CCTV cameras and the other two occupants of the car 'rolled” on him.

X-rays showed the extent of the damage to Paul's left leg: the bullet entered just above the knee and blew away a large chunk of his femur, or thigh-bone, before breaking into fragments which remain there today.

Police told him the bullet was likely a high calibre, probably .222 or .223, and the rifle may have been cut down because of how the shooter was able to conceal it.

Paul was operated on by surgeon Alan Crombie, who told Stuff he'd only done a handful of gunshot cases here and in his native Scotland.

'It's not like if you were working in the States or South Africa in a busy emergency department, you probably see them every week.”

There was significant bone trauma in Paul's case, he says.

'If you see the x-rays, you can see that it's ... exploded, the lower part of his femur. It's not like a break, where there's two bits to click back together. There was a big area of ... nothing in the middle, cornflakes really.”

Crombie says it was important to clean the entry wound to stave off infection. There was also the complication of the bullet being close to his femoral artery, a major blood vessel.

There was some damage to the artery, but it wasn't 'leaking”, Crombie says. If the artery had ruptured, he could have bled out.

'You'd like to think that somebody would stick their finger in the hole and stop the bleeding and bring him to hospital – but [bleeding out] is a possibility for sure.”

Crombie inserted a titanium plate and screws to stabilise the bone, and Paul was taken to Waikato Hospital the following day so vascular surgeons could monitor his artery.

He was in hospital for about 10 days. About three weeks after he was discharged, he developed a bad pain in his side.

He initially declined an ambulance, finally getting a mate to take him to hospital the next day, where it was discovered he had a blood clot in his right lung – a result of the leg trauma – and several smaller ones in his left lung.

'The doctor said it was the biggest clot he'd seen. If I hadn't gone into hospital ... I would have probably died.”

Paul's recovery was long and gruelling. He was on crutches for several months, and had several falls. After about a year his plate snapped, and he had to have another inserted, along with a bone graft using donated bone.

Crombie explains that while there was a little bone growth over that period, it had not achieved union.

'The bone hadn't fully bridged. What was ultimately holding his top part of the femur to the bottom part was the plate.”

It's now a matter of 'waiting and watching”, Crombie says, to see if the bone will fully bridge and make the plate unnecessary.

'It's not a fast process. He seems to be going in the right direction. Will it work, or will he need another procedure? I don't know.”

Paul doesn't want to 'come across like a basket case” – he knows others have it worse than him – but it's clear the ordeal has taken a huge toll on him mentally and emotionally.

Paul's leg after surgery. Supplied photo/Stufff.

ACC paid for sessions with a psychologist, who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

On his dark days, he wonders if it would have been better if he'd just bled out on the street. 'I wouldn't have known any better.”

He realises now that the blood clots 'pushed me over the edge”.

'Now I'm thinking, God, if the trauma of being shot ... was not hard enough to deal with, these clots were life-threatening and can have further complications.

'This all lead to different thoughts and emotions – anger, hate, self-pity, self-destruction. The mind is cruel and can take you to dark places.

'On one hand I'm doing breathing exercises, throwing my all into stretching, exercising and building my leg up, then on the other hand I didn't want to be here any more.”

The stress of it all led to Paul and Jane, who have one adult son, separating. They remain good friends.

Paul and his partner Jane have separated partly due to the stress of the shooting. Photo: Christel Yardley/Stuff.

In July, the offender – now 19 and with interim name suppression – was sentenced to two years, five months imprisonment on charges of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and unlawful possession of a firearm. (The gun was never found.)

Soon after the sentencing, Paul got a letter from the parole board informing him the man would be eligible for parole in April. The starting point for sentencing had been nine years, but 'discounts” were given for things such as his age and guilty plea.

'It doesn't seem fair, he did just about kill me. It's just saying, you can carry a gun around and shoot someone for no reason, and you're out within less than a year,” Paul says. 'I have to live with this for the rest of my life.”

He says the system seems geared towards the offender rather than the victim. Court staff kept pestering him about having a restorative justice meeting with his attacker, even after he'd firmly told them no.

'It's something I'm not interested in doing. He didn't steal a bike off me ... he just about killed me. I don't care about the guy ... I'm not interested in meeting him, I don't need that, it's not going to be helpful to me.”

Pre-sentence reports on the offender said he had a violent upbringing, abused substances and alcohol, was surrounded by gang culture and was culturally disconnected, according to Rotorua's Daily Post.

He was prone to reacting violently to perceived threats and when under the influence of alcohol.

Judge Eddie Paul said the teen was entitled to make inquiries about what he thought he saw with Paul and Jane, but it should have been obvious there was nothing untoward happening, the Post reported.

"Despite that [the offender's] response was to gratuitously, with no provocation, shoot this innocent member of the public in the leg, causing lifelong injury.”

The judge said it was concerning that the youth had been assessed as being a moderate risk for future serious violent offending.

The man's lawyer has indicated he will appeal the sentence.

The shooting has caused anxiety for Jane, as well. 'You don't feel safe any more about being in certain situations. You're more wary of people when you don't necessarily need to be.”

Paul says that, two years on, he's mostly in a better place. He returned to work on light duties a few months after the shooting, but still gets tired and can only work half-days.

'I've made it through to this point, although I still have dark times and ailments.

'There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about it. I tell myself I am no longer a victim, I'm a survivor.”

He says he and Jane had done everything right that night – using cabs instead of driving, leaving when it was time to go home – yet they ran up against an increasingly violent society.

'People need to be aware, it's very real. This is what's happening out there. It could happen to anybody. I'm just a member of the public on my way home – how the hell does this happen?”​​​​​​

-Stuff/Tony Wall.