Guilty of robbing elderly man

A jury took just over an hour to find a woman guilty of kidnapping and robbing an 87-year-old man in Hastings.

Maera Todd, 40, was on trial in Napier District Court facing charges of aggravated robbery, kidnapping, and theft. Her victim was David Geor, who was grabbed violently from a Hastings supermarket car park while putting groceries in his car on July 28, 2018.

Geor was thrown face down in the rear foot well of his own car, then driven around Hastings while his assailants withdrew his money from ATM machines.

The jury retired to begin deliberating at 12.20pm yesterday. It reached its verdicts by 1.30pm, finding Todd guilty on all three counts. She will be sentenced in March.

Earlier, jurors were told that

Todd had pleaded guilty to robbing Christchurch couple John and Colleen McCammon, both in their eighties, with another woman on August 13, 2018.

Todd appeared in Christchurch District Court last year and was jailed for seven years, four months.

Todd’s lawyer, Eric Forster, did not call any witnesses. He told the jury that there was simply not enough evidence to convict Todd.

He reminded them that Geor’s description of his assailants did not match Todd’s appearance, and that he failed to pick her out from a photograph montage.

Forster said none of Todd’s DNA or fingerprints were found in Geor’s car, and he invited them to question the evidence around Todd’s accomplice Kahurangi Waerea, who was last year convicted of being an accessory after the fact of the assault on Geor.

He also told them that while Todd had committed the attack in Christchurch, and that ‘‘you may really dislike my client’’, the jurors had to guard against prejudice and look at the facts.

Just because she committed one crime, did not mean she had committed the other, he said.

In opening the case against Todd, Crown prosecutor Megan Mitchell said Geor was pushed headfirst into his car, landing face down in the foot well.

The theft charge related to $95 of items Todd was accused of stealing on the day of the kidnapping of Geor.