Napier bloke ‘let rip’ with 500 paintballs after boy racers kept family awake

A Napier dad ended up facing the Armed Offenders Squad after unloading 500 paintballs at a group of boy racers who’d been keeping his family awake for months near the Mission Hills subdivision.

Ben Savidge, his partner, and their two young kids had only been in the area about 18 months before the nightly “doof doof” sessions started kicking off down the road, Stuff reports. 

According to Savidge, dozens of cars would roll in most weekends, blasting music, revving engines, yelling, drinking and doing burnouts from around 8pm through to the early hours.

And when your kids are one and two years old, that sort of carry-on gets old real quick.

Savidge told Stuff he’d tried speaking to the group himself, but said things got heated. After that, he says he spent months bouncing between Napier City Council and Police trying to get someone to sort it out.

“The kids were waking up crying because they can feel the vibration from the noise,” he said. “I was really pissed off, because you can't do anything about it”.

So one Saturday night in February, he grabbed a paintball gun, snuck up to a spot overlooking the gathering, and “just let rip at the cars”.

“Some of them ran down the hill, some of them ran and jumped in their cars. I was just laughing my head off, but, yeah, they were all quite petrified, I imagine,” he said.

Then cue seven cop cars, armed officers and dogs outside his house not long later.

Savidge pleaded guilty to presenting a restricted weapon, got 40 hours community work, and had the paintball gun confiscated. 

Problem is, he says the boy racers are still out there doing laps, carrying on like nothing happened, and even doing skids on his driveway. 

Which means everyone’s right back where they started, except now one bloke’s down a paintball gun.