It was an event that shattered our feeling that we lived in a safe community, and one that valued above all else the protection of the vulnerable.

The bashing death of a child at the hands of his mother and her defacto partner left a deep scar in the town of Nowra – one that will probably never be healed.

It may be 21 years ago, but the Shoalhaven community will never forget what happened to six-year-old John Ashfield.

After torturing and bashing the child to the point of near death, the boy’s mother, Gunn-Britt Ashfield and her partner of three months, Austin Hughes, coached his siblings to lie about what happened.

John’s brother was made to tell the police that he and John had been set upon in a park by “four youths” who had bashed John and left him for dead.

Painting themselves as a distraught family desperate to find the offenders, Austin Hughes told the Nowra News on August 11, 1993, he was devastated that “someone can do this to a little chap who is so young in life”.

He told the newspaper the family had moved to Nowra from Sydney to get away from the “stabbings and attacks that happen there”.

But the truth would come out.  Hughes and Ashfield had beaten John with a hammer through a phone book and forced his siblings to join in the abuse.

John was taken to hospital with massive brain damage and died two days later.

When the pair were arrested, Nowra erupted in anger. The deed was unthinkable enough without the cowardly and pathetic lie of trying to pin it on someone else.

An angry mob greeted Hughes and Ashfield at their court appearance and blocked the armoured prison vans.

Twenty-one years on and Hughes and Ashfield have served their sentences and changed their identities.

But they can’t change what they did – and it’s a crime our community will never forget on behalf of that innocent little boy.