Three years ago, police tactical officer Shaun Winstanley was part of the squad sent to a 21-storey construction site on Queen St in downtown Auckland, after a contractor armed with a shotgun began shooting coworkers. Matu Reid killed two workers and injured several others before taking his own life. Winstanley was among the wounded: his jaw shattered into at least 12 pieces, five teeth gone, and thermal burns across his face from the pellets.
Recovery, he now says, may never be complete. He recently marked what he thought was his 20th and final procedure, only for a scan to reveal a lesion on his gum days later - more surgery, more sutures, possibly even the reinsertion of teeth. Surgeons still occasionally remove pellets, metal implants ache in cold weather, and eating a burger takes effort. Roughly 30 or 40 pellets remain in his face, invisible from the outside.
The NZ Herald's Kim Knight spoke to Winstanley at a turning point. A year ago he was reluctant to be interviewed, not wanting to be defined as "the cop who was shot in the face". Now he speaks openly - about mental health, vulnerability, and the identity reckoning that followed the shooting. "Identity is not a job," he says, describing himself as a husband, dad, sports coach, advocate and entrepreneur rather than a single label.
That entrepreneurial thread started as a kitchen experiment born of frustration: during early recovery he couldn't eat properly or tolerate hot drinks, and brewed his way into Firebird Energy, the company behind Firebird Protein Coffee - a brand he first promoted at Auckland's Food Show. The business is growing too. From October 13, a new flavourless protein powder that works in hot and cold liquids will roll out nationwide through Z Energy's barista coffee offering as a protein latte and iced coffee.
There's more to the story than product launches. Winstanley has connected with the family of another officer wounded on duty, mentor-style, passing on hard-won perspective about the long haul of recovery. He has been on long-term unpaid leave but hopes to return to policing - though only at 100%, given what colleagues and the public rely on officers to do. His wife Nicky retrained and now works as an emergency medical technician with Hato Hone St John, a career shift the family says the shooting unexpectedly made possible.
So why run this on a travel site? Because stories like this are part of what a place is. Winstanley's account is a human face on downtown Auckland - Queen St, the tower block, the first responders, and a city that moved on quickly after headlines faded. It's also a genuinely useful read on New Zealand's frontline reality: police there encounter firearms nearly 10 times a day, by figures reported last year. And for any traveller who enjoys a story about turning adversity into something useful, it's a reminder that the people serving your flat white at a Z service station might be part of a much bigger recovery story. Resilience, as Winstanley puts it, is mostly about showing up.
