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Anna Molenaar - Source: Close Up -
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Jan Molenaar's family spoke out exclusively to ONE News on Sunday, saying they are devastated by what's happened.
Molenaar's deadly rampage will most certainly become one of Napier's dark legends. His shooting adventure cost a police officer's life and left three others wounded - two who are still in a serious condition.
But his family cannot understand why he would do such a thing, describing him as a good and strong man.
Peter Molenaar's, the gunman's brother, says Jan just snapped.
"Lot of stress and worry and paranoia, whatever, has just eaten at him and I think that day of them [police officers looking for cannabis] wandering in the house ... was just an invasion of his privacy," says Peter.
Peter believes Jan's paranoia couldn't handle what he must have felt was as an invasion of his privacy in his own home and decided shooting the officers was the only way he could deal with it.
A close friend of Jan's was Wayne Rollinson, who says he looked up to Jan.
"I think a lot of him and to me he's a legend," says Rollinson.
For 30 years Rollinson and Jan were mates. Their houses are just a few hundred metres apart.
Rollinson says the man the media and the country saw, the crazed gunman, wasn't Jan and wasn't who he was.
Jan Molenaar was a fitness fanatic who protected his privacy fiercely.
After gunning down police officer Len Snee and wounding two other officers who had arrived at his house for a routine cannabis check, along with a neighbour, his friends predicted he would not be captured alive.
"He didn't like his life being disrupted. Not by friends and other people and especially not the police," says Rollinson.
A former friend, who did not want to be named, said everyone knew that you just didn't mess with Jan.
With a mix of military weapons and erratic mood swings, Jan Molenaar cut a formidable figure for someone who knew him a decade ago.
"I was scared, I was very scared of him. To start with he was quite warm and friendly, but the longer I got there, the more I saw this side to him," says the former acquaintance.
Jan's family was one of many who waited out the tense stand-off with the rest of Napier, watching in horror, and wondering how a man they knew and loved could turn out to be someone who terrorised his neighbourhood for over three days.
Peter says he sent Jan a text telling him that he loved him a lot, but he says perhaps by then he may have already been dead in the master bedroom where his body was later found by police.
Jan's body is still in the master bedroom where police found him on Saturday and is likely to remain there until late in the day on Monday as police continue scene examinations.
Jan's family say they have been planning his funeral since Friday night and his partner says once his body is returned, she plans to take it back to the house before he is buried.
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