A man who evaded authorities with his three children in the remote New Zealand countryside for nearly four years was shot and killed by a police
Officer on Monday, law enforcement said that one child was with Tom Phillips at the time of the confrontation and the other two children were found in the forest hours after the shootout, in which an officer was critically injured, reported CBS News.
The December 2021 disappearance of Phillips and his children - now about 9, 10 and 11 years old - confounded investigators for years as they scoured the densely forested area where they believed the family was hiding.
The father and children weren't believed to ever have traveled far from the isolated North Island rural settlement of Marokopa where they lived, and credible sightings of them were rare.
Phillips hasn't been formally identified, but authorities believe he was the man killed.
A police officer was shot in the head and critically injured during a confrontation with Phillips after he robbed an agricultural supplies store early Monday morning, New Zealand's Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Jill Rogers told reporters in the city of Hamilton.
The child with Phillips at the time of the robbery was taken into custody.