River death accused: I just saw red

A man accused of manslaughter by chasing another man into the Waikato River, where he drowned, says he last saw the victim alive, and climbing onto logs in the middle of the river.

The trial of Neville Patrick Harris, 48, continued yesterday in the High Court in Hamilton.

The single charge he faces states that he ‘‘caused the death of Tama Hurinui Retimana by causing him, by fear of violence, to do an act which caused his death, and thereby committed manslaughter’’ on December 24.

Retimana, 29 – known among the homeless community as ‘‘Mason’’ – was found dead in the Waikato River by a kayaker on December 27.

Post-mortem results showed the father of two – who was living in a campsite he had constructed by the edge of the river – had been assaulted, suffering facial injuries, before he drowned.

The jury was played a video of a police interview with Harris, held soon after he was arrested in a car park at Five Crossroads in Hamilton on January 4. Harris recounted his view of the events of that morning.

He and his friend Wilson Hipango had walked from their own campsite to a Retimana’s camp the previous evening. The three of them and another woman spent the evening talking and drinking from a bottle of homemade moonshine that Harris had brewed.

Harris went back to his own camp, but returned the next morning, and he, Retimana and Hipango continued drinking the rest of the moonshine – ‘‘passing the bottle backwards and forwards. Being campers, basically,’’ he told the detectives Mason Lepou and Scott Mckenzie, who were conducting the interview.

The woman was passed out in a bed at the campsite.

‘‘At some stage Mason decided he was going to have sex with her,’’ Harris said.

‘‘I started to get a bit upset with him … a guy doing that in front of a couple of visitors.’’

Harris pulled him off and ‘‘hooked him up the nose. He thanked me for punching him in the nose … to snap him out of it.’’

But five to 10 minutes later Retimana was back and apparently molesting the woman.

He then approached Harris and thrust his finger at him and asked if he wanted to have a threesome.

‘‘That’s when I really saw red and let him have it. I knew what he was doing was wrong … a friend of mine doing that in front of other friends.

‘‘That’s not cool. I gave him another crack. I think I gave him my knee and gave him an uppercut.’’ Retimana stumbled towards the river.

‘‘I went to grab him away from the water in case he fell in, and next thing he just dived in.’’

Retimana began swimming with a freestyle strokes, but soon switched to a dog-paddle style as he moved further out into the river.

Harris last saw Retimana, apparently naked, climbing up onto logs which had accumulated around a support pile of the Boundary Rd bridge.