By Anna Burns-Francis
A Dunedin man campaigning for a change to euthanasia laws after helping his mother commit suicide has had death threats and a brick thrown through his window.
Sean Davison is serving home detention for helping his terminally ill mother kill herself.
Mr Davison is serving his sentence at home - but prison could be a safer option.
He has received two threatening notes in recent days, one of them thrown through the living room window with a brick.
“That was quite alarming but when I looked at the note on the brick it contained a death threat - and that was quite scary,” says Mr Davison.
He is serving five months home detention at his friend's Dunedin house, after admitting he helped his terminally ill mother commit suicide six years ago. She was on a hunger strike and taking large amounts of morphine.
The death threats have a biblical flavour - one of them reading: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life... You mother killer."
Mr Davison is stunned anyone of faith could send hate mail.
“It did not come from a church-going person. It was a cowardly act and maybe using the church as a way of hiding their own feelings.”
And Christian observers agree.
“It's always sad when people use violence to attack other people that they disagree with. And it's sad when they say they're doing it in the name of God,” says reverend Anne Thomson.
Police are investigating the threats and Mr Davison is vowing to help them find out who is responsible.
“They took incredible care to cut out letters from a magazine, and glue them to make the message,” he says. They took a lot of care over that, folded it up, and put it into an envelope and then hand wrote my name and address on the envelope - which shows they weren't thinking too clearly about what they were doing.”
Mr Davison plans to send the letters to his forensics lab in South Africa for DNA testing, before passing the results onto police.
3 News