Murderer says he was mentally ill during attack

Mental health patient Gabriel Yad-Elohim has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a pensioner in Auckland.

In search of a drug fix, YadElohim, 30, was led to a Western Springs flat by a person he met in the central city on September 26, 2017. When he realised he had been swindled out of $200, he pulled Michael Mulholland out of his apartment and kicked him for five minutes.

Crown prosecutor Kirsten Lummis argued it was a drug deal gone wrong, while the defence said Yad-Elohim was suffering from psychosis and schizophrenia. Yesterday at the High Court in Auckland, Justice Gerard van Bohemen sentenced Yad-Elohim to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 13 years.

A jury found Yad-Elohim guilty of murder, in August.

Yad-Elohim said at the start of the proceedings yesterday that he was mentally ill when the incident happened.

The daughter of Mulholland read out her victim impact statement to the court.

She said her father was ‘‘not a drug dealer, not a gang member ... he was an old man chilling in his house, probably having a beer reading a book’’.

Defence lawyer Matthew Goodwin argued Yad-Elohim was still mentally unstable.

There was a ‘‘fundamentally flawed discharge’’ and a failure in the system when Yad-Elohim was released from and acute mental health unit days before the attack, Goodwin said.

‘‘The tragedy of this case is he wasn’t kept there for longer and there wasn’t more done to try straighten him out.’’

Dr Krishna Pillai, of the Mason Clinic, said Yad-Elohim was no longer mentally distorted following treatment and could be moved to the prison system.

Yad-Elohim came to New Zealand from South Korea when he was young but identified himself as Japanese.

He had a long history of mental health issues and had been hospitalised numerous times in both New Zealand and overseas since 2009.