🚨 “He was the most loving dad you’d ever meet… until he wasn’t.”

For 36 years Dean Field was the guy who built blanket forts, coached August’s cricket team, and carried little Goldie on his shoulders everywhere. Then something snapped — and in one afternoon of flames, he took his three babies and himself.

Now, for the first time, his own family is breaking their silence:

The sleepless nights they ignored
The terrifying midnight phone calls
The moment they realised he believed the world was “coming for his kids”
And the heartbreaking words they’ll never forgive themselves for not acting on

They’re not asking for sympathy. They’re begging you to see the warning signs before another family is torn apart.

This isn’t a defence. It’s a desperate warning. The full story — the final texts, the unburned body in the ashes, the mother left with nothing — will rip your heart out. Click before you scroll past.

In the blackened shell of what was once a happy family home on Feilding Road, Dean Field’s relatives are left clutching memories and a crushing guilt that words can’t soothe.

“Until he was 36 years old, Dean had been nothing but a loving father,” his older sister Lisa Field told reporters this week, her voice cracking. “He lived for those kids. Then something inside him shattered, and we didn’t see how bad it was until it was too late. He was just a broken man trying to keep them safe in the only way his mind would let him.”

On November 15, 2025, the 42-year-old mechanic locked the doors, set the single-storey weatherboard house alight, and died alongside August (7), Hugo (5), and one-year-old Goldie in what police have officially declared a murder-suicide arson. Their mother, Chelsey Field, was grocery shopping 25 minutes away when neighbours called emergency services after seeing flames tear through the roof.

In their first extended interview since the funerals, Dean’s family laid bare the devastating timeline of his decline.

It began, they say, with the stillbirth of the couple’s fourth child, Iris, in 2023. “Dean carried that grief like a stone in his chest,” his mother Florence said. “He’d sit in the nursery they’d painted for her and just stare at the empty cot for hours.”

By early 2025 the cracks were visible:

He quit his steady job at a Palmerston North workshop, telling mates “the system is poisoned.”
He stopped sleeping more than two hours a night, pacing the hallway checking locks.
He began telling the children the world outside was “full of monsters” and that “Daddy would keep them safe forever.”
On November 9 — six days before the fire — he turned up at his parents’ house at midnight with the kids in pyjamas. “He looked wild-eyed,” Florence recalled. “He said he just needed to know we were all okay. Then he loaded them back in the car and left.”
Two nights later he rang his brother at 3 a.m. whispering, “If anything happens, tell Chelsey I did it to protect them.”

“We kept saying ‘he’s just stressed, he’ll snap out of it’,” Lisa admitted. “We begged Chelsey to get him to a doctor. She tried. He refused. Rural mental health waitlists here are six to nine months. By the time you realise it’s an emergency, it’s too late.”

Chelsey Field, 38, has remained largely silent since the tragedy, releasing only a brief statement confirming the couple were not separated and thanking the community for support. Behind closed doors, sources say she is “utterly destroyed,” sleeping in the lounge of a friend’s house because she cannot face an empty bedroom.

Police confirmed Dean’s body was found unburned near the children, suggesting he waited until smoke and flames had done their work before succumbing — a detail that has haunted investigators and family alike.

“No note was found,” Detective Inspector Jeremy Sharp told media on November 20. “But a journal recovered from Dean’s workbench had repeated entries about ‘keeping them pure’ and ‘not letting the darkness take them.’ This appears to have been a deliberate act born out of severe mental distress.”

The children’s funeral on November 24 was a gut-wrenching sea of tiny coffins: August’s covered in cricket stickers, Hugo’s with plastic dinosaurs, Goldie’s barely larger than a breadbox. Hundreds lined the streets of Sanson as the hearses passed. Dean was farewelled privately two days earlier; only immediate family attended.

His relatives are adamant they are not excusing what he did.

“There is no acceptable reason for what Dean took from us and from Chelsey,” Lisa said fiercely. “Those babies deserved to grow up. Chelsey deserved to watch them blow out birthday candles. We’re speaking because if one person reads this and drags their brother, their mate, their husband to a doctor when they start talking like Dean did… then maybe something good can come out of this nightmare.”

Community leaders in Manawatū have already begun pushing for change. A petition calling for mandatory mental health checks when family violence or custody concerns are raised has gathered 18,000 signatures in a week. Local MP Mark Cameron tabled an urgent debate in Parliament, asking why rural crisis teams still face two-hour response times.

As summer wildflowers begin to push through the scorched earth where the Field house once stood, the family has one final plea.

“If someone you love is scaring you with the way they’re talking — even if they swear it’s about protecting the kids — don’t wait,” Florence said, clutching a photo of Dean laughing with August on his shoulders. “We waited. And now we have to live with four graves instead of one broken man we could have saved.”

Chelsey, through her Givealittle page, added a single line that has been shared thousands of times:

“Hug your babies extra tight tonight. Some of us don’t get tomorrow.”