The man who murdered five people by lighting the Loafers Lodge blaze has been sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of release for at least 22 years.
Esarona David Lologa set the central Wellington boarding house alight in May 2023.
Michael Wahrlich, Melvin Parun, Peter O'Sullivan, Kenneth Barnard and Liam Hockings died in the fire.
The 50-year-old was sentenced in the High Court in Wellington today to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 22 years.
He will be detained as a special patient in a hospital, and will need to be assessed before he can be moved a prison.
A 14 year sentence for arson will be served concurrently.
Judge Peter Churchman told the courtroom filled with family members and former residents of Loafers Lodge that he considered a range of factors in his decisions.
Those were the degree of planning for the lighting of the fires, the number of people killed in the blaze, the arson charge and the vulnerability of the victims.
Churchman also considered the man's antisocial behaviour and schizophrenia, which reduced the minimum non-parole period by three years.
He said the severity of the arson charge meant the maximum penalty of 14 years was required.
In September this year, a jury found Lologa guilty of five counts of murder and guilty of one count of arson.
His defence argued that he was insane when he lit the fire.
The Crown called about 100 witnesses over its four weeks of evidence.
They included Loafers Lodge residents who described their harrowing escapes from the blaze, firefighters who fought tears recounting their experiences and, crucially, five mental health professionals who believed Lologa was not insane when he lit the fire.
The experts said Lologa did know that his actions were morally wrong.
They pointed to Lologa's own comments to police and psychiatrists, including that he had "done nothing wrong", as evidence he understood the difference between right and wrong.
During the trial psychiatrist Dr Krishna Pillai, testifying for the defence, believed the man was insane when he lit the fire, and was experiencing a serious psychotic relapse.
Pillai told the court the man's hallucinations - hearing voices telling him to light the fire - rendered him incapable of knowing lighting it was morally wrong, which is a threshold required for an insanity defence.
Esarona Lologa - also known as Esa - was born in Wellington in 1975, but was raised by his grandmother and uncle in a small village near Apia in Samoa.
He was initially educated in Samoa but moved to Wellington when he was about 13 years old, where he lived with his uncle. He attended high school in Lower Hutt.
As a young man, Lologa had a relationship with a woman almost 20 years his senior, who had a teenage son.
In 2009, Lologa was convicted of attempting to murder the son with a machete after he believed his partner was cheating on him.
Lologa had 50 previous convictions - including the attempted murder and an attempted arson in 1996, after he broke into a butcher and tried to burn it down.
He had also been found guilty of common assault and fraud.
He first came to the attention of mental health services in 1999, when he was 24. He was hearing voices in his head that were swearing at him.
Lologa was diagnosed as having schizophrenia and was first admitted to a mental health facility in 2000.
The Wellington court heard details about Lologa's clinical history spanning more than two decades, including nine hospital admissions.
As an adult Lologa lived in Wellington and Auckland. He stayed in social housing and boarding houses, as well as his car and the street, psychiatrists told the court.
On April 21 in 2023, Lologa absconded from a mental health facility, three weeks before the Loafers Lodge fire, and there was a warrant out for his arrest.
