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Chaos broke out after a car full of teenagers with a drunk woman in the front passenger seat allegedly knocked over the woman’s partner and smashed the windscreen on a Te Puke street.
A teenage girl who was sitting in the back seat told the court she screamed in anger and yelled “f**k” after the teenage driver hit the man.
The passengers panicked as the driver made a U-turn at a dead end and the drunken woman allegedly punched and yelled at the driver while trying to grab the steering wheel.
He managed to make a U-turn and then hit the man a second time, this time as he lay in the road.
When paramedics arrived, the man had no pulse and was not breathing, and was later pronounced dead at the scene.
The teenage driver and 40-year-old Ephron Ronaki are on trial in the High Court in Hamilton, jointly charged with murder.
Prosecutors said Ronaji encouraged the teenage driver to run over her partner, Taku Manu Paul, which he did twice.
The court heard how Paul and his two teenage passengers were in the back seat of a car when he was hit by it late one night in late 2022.
The teen said they were on their way to meet Paul because Ronaji believed he had stolen a $500 Christmas gift she had received and she wanted the money back.
The court heard evidence that Ronaji and Paul argued loudly on the speakerphone while Ronaji was in the front seat and the car’s passengers were heading to a nearby party where they knew Paul might be.
A teenage boy in the back seat said under cross-examination by defense attorney Caitlin Gentleman that less than a minute after he and another teenage boy were taken away to assist in the standoff, they turned a corner and saw Paul walking on the side of the road.
Ronaji and Paul continued to scream at each other, accusing each other of knocking Paul down.
The teenager told Crown prosecutor Marc Corlett KC that Paul kept saying “get run over”.
Under cross-examination by the driver’s attorney, Ron Mansfield KC, he agreed with Mansfield’s account that Ronaki screamed something like “Yeah, run him over” at the teenage driver behind the wheel.
The teenage passenger gave evidence earlier in the trial that within seconds of Paul being spotted he was struck and his windscreen shattered.
He told Esquire it was “so fast that I didn’t even have time to think about it”.
The teenage girl, who was also in the back seat, gave evidence of the chaotic circumstances surrounding the collision in Te Puke’s backstreet.
The court heard messages in the group chat indicated the carload of teenagers had been recruited to help Ronacky confront her accomplices about the missing money.
It is said that Ronaki had argued with Paul all night and felt very upset afterwards.
Messages between the teens included “hahaha (she’s) crying” and references to Paul needing to “hide” and “bottle up,” and requests that the confrontation be filmed.
The vehicle picked up the teenagers from an address in Te Puke.
The two girls told the court that when they got in the car and saw Ronaji, she was drunk.
Hours after the incident, police conducted a breath alcohol test on Ronaji, which showed that his breath alcohol content was 695 micrograms per litre.
One of the teens said under cross-examination that Paul also appeared to have drunk a lot of alcohol, judging by his voice on the speakerphone.
When Paul is found, a telephone argument between Ronaji and Paul escalates into threats to hit him with their car; Paul encourages them to do so.
Seconds later, he was hit. The car turned around, went back the same way, and hit him again.
The girl testified that the scene between the two attacks was chaotic, loud and full of anger.
She said when a teenage boy in the back seat tried to calm her down, she screamed and there were sounds of yelling and fighting from the front seat.
“I was just shouting ‘what the hell is this’,” she said.
“I don’t know what I’m saying, but I’m just angry.”
After the incident, Ronaji turned herself in to the police and told them she was driving when she hit her partner.
She was charged with obstruction of justice, with prosecutors saying she made the false confession to protect the teenage driver from prosecution.
The trial continues.
– Hannah Bartlett, Open Justice reporter
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