Killer was on final warning
Too late for RNZ journalist
Just days before Nicho Waipuka punched and stomped a Wellington journalist to death, he narrowly escaped being jailed for a similarly unprovoked assault.
The family of Phillip Cottrell said it was like ‘‘an earthquake’’ when they learned yesterday that the chance to lock up Waipuka had been missed.
A District Court judge decided on November 22, 2011, not to follow a probation officer’s recommendation that Waipuka be given a prison sentence on charges including assault and threatening to kill.
Seventeen days later, on December 10, Waipuka killed Mr Cottrell, 43, as he walked home from a night shift at Radio New Zealand and robbed him of $80.
Even though District Court judge Ian Mill said Waipuka, then 19, ‘‘quite clearly’’ should have been sent to prison, he allowed the Killer Beez gang associate to walk free from the Lower Hutt District Court with an intensive supervision sentence.
He was to have alcohol and drug abuse treatment, and attend a tikanga Maori programme, with the possibility of other treatment or counselling intended to improve him.
Judge Mill endorsed Waipuka’s file with a formal ‘‘final warning’’ and said he would personally review his progress in three months.
By then, Mr Cottrell was dead, after Waipuka unleashed what a High Court judge yesterday called swift and brutal ‘‘recreational violence’’ on him.
Waipuka even tried to use his ‘‘last chance’’ sentence as part of a false alibi for the killing.
‘‘I’m on intensive supervision, bro. Check with my missus, she don’t let me go nowhere,’’ he told police.
The fact that he killed Mr Cottrell while still under the supervision sentence, and had 24 previous convictions that included three for violence, became the grounds for his manslaughter sentence of 12 years and 10 months yesterday.
Justice Forrie Miller said he considered life imprisonment for an attack that was ‘‘very close indeed to murder’’.
Waipuka has to serve at least 81⁄ years before he can be considered for parole.
Mr Cottrell had described himself as having ‘‘old lady bones’’ as a result of a rare medical condition. Justice Miller said it was no excuse for Waipuka to say that Mr Cottrell was unexpectedly vulnerable.
Manuel Renera Robinson, 18, who was with him at the time of the attack, was acquitted of both murder and manslaughter.