WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — 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 Monday, law enforcement said.

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 shoot-out, in which an officer was critically injured.

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 were not believed to ever have traveled far from the isolated North Island rural settlement of Marokopa where they lived, but credible sightings of them w

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