Te Puke Xmas Row: Teenager's tears as he describes the moment his car hit a man

A teenager cried as he told police he “speeded” then ran over the partner of an angry woman who was in the front seat of the car he was driving.

“I accelerated and hit him… [he] I got out of the car and drove down the road, then turned around and hit him again.

The boy broke down in tears as he described the incident in a video interview with police played in the High Court in Hamilton today.

Later in the interview, he told police he thought the man “would have jumped out of the way.”

The teenager, whose name has been suppressed, is defending a murder charge, alongside Ephron Ronaki, whose partner was struck, in a trial which began last week.

It is alleged that Ronaki, 40, harassed the teenager by ordering her to run over her partner, Taku Manu Paul.

The court heard Paul also incited them to hit him with the car.

Paul and Ronaki had been drinking heavily one afternoon and evening in late 2022. They began arguing over Ronaki's suspicions that Paul had taken $500 that had been given to him for Christmas.

After they broke up that night, their drunken arguments continued over the phone.

Ronaki and a car full of teenagers were on their way to find and confront Paul, and attempt to recover the money, when they turned a corner and saw him walking down a side street in Te Puke.

One of the teenagers, who was in the back seat, told the court she heard Paul on loudspeaker, shouting that the car should run over him.

Ronaki had also yelled at the driver to “run him over then,” or words to that effect, the teen witness acknowledged during cross-examination by defense attorney Ron Mansfield, KC, who represents the accused teen.

Paul was hit, then after turning around at the cul-de-sac, the boy hit him a second time.

Between the first and second impact, the car went into chaos, the teenage passengers heard in court.

Ronaki and one of the teens were screaming and trying to grab the steering wheel. The boy had remained silent for the seconds leading up to the man's attack, as well as the following seconds before he repeated the act.

He said in his video interview that the woman swore at him and yelled at him to stop, but he continued driving.

Paul was then found on the road by passers-by. A 111 call was played to the court where a woman's distressed voice could be heard saying “he's not breathing and he's white and pale”.

When paramedics arrived, Paul had no pulse, was not breathing and could not be resuscitated.

He was pronounced dead at the scene.

But the teens in the car said that even after realizing Paul had been hit twice, they didn't expect him to die.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Andrew Schulze, who represents Ronaki, one of the teenage passengers confirmed that she told police they thought he would be OK because he was ” a tough guy.”

After the incident, the woman went to the police. She also faces a charge of perverting the course of justice, and the Crown says she made a false confession to protect the teen from police prosecution.

Two of the boy's friends testified during the trial.

One of them said during cross-examination that they met him after the incident and that the normally upbeat boy remained very calm, in shock and not sure what to do.

He said the teenager described feeling “yuck” about what had happened and agreed with Mansfield's proposition that the teenager had been “withdrawing” and not himself.

The court heard from several witnesses that the boy had never been in trouble with police before, was attending secondary school and was working part-time at the time of the incident.

The Crown says the teen, encouraged by the woman, deliberately ran over Paul, driving on the wrong side of the road and partly onto the sidewalk to hit him.

The trial continues.

Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice journalist at NZME. She previously covered courts and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that she was a radio journalist at Newstalk ZB.