Fatal beating follows smiley faces and loving messages
Mike Mather
About an hour before he killed her, Richard Coburn sent his sometimes partner a text message, asking his “babe” if she needed anything from the supermarket.
“Cool as babe,” Paige Tutemahurangi replied soon after. “Our dinner should be done by the time you come home, and no thank you darling I thought I better not be lazy,” she wrote back, adding a smiley face emoji.
“Me and son have already been to supermarket to get some fizzys for us.”
It may have been the last loving words exchanged between the pair. By about 8.30pm, Tutemahurangi was dying, having suffered what would prove fatal brain injuries following a beating by Coburn.
Richard Mathew Coburn, 26, is now on trial in Hamilton, charged with the murder of Tutemahurangi, 25, in her own home in Kahikatea Drive in Hamilton on the evening of Saturday, July 1 last year.
Whether Coburn wanted to kill Tutemahurangi, or knew that repeatedly punching the woman in her head and face was likely to cause her death - but went ahead anyway - is a central factor in the trial.
If the jury agree that is the case - as put forth by Crown prosecutor Rebecca Mann they will deem that Coburn is indeed guilty of murder.
But they must also consider the argument of defence counsel Roger Laybourn, who says Coburn never intended to kill Tutemahurangi when he assaulted her and thus can only be guilty of manslaughter.
On the trial’s second day yesterday, the jury were given a timeline of Coburn’s movements and messages that day, including the texts between him and Tutemahurangi.
They were also played a videotaped interview Coburn had at the Hamilton Police Station with Detective Rowan Ware, after he was arrested later that night.
Coburn said it had been a normal day of doing chores and spending time with his on-again, off-again partner and their 18-month old son, before he went out to visit his brother, who lived in Lake Rd.
After having “four or five beers” with his brother, he had driven back to the Kahikatea Drive home, where he had been staying with Tutemahurangi.
He had found the front door locked, so he went around to the rear of the home and knocked on the door, he said.
When she opened it for him, the pair began arguing “because I knocked on the door quite rough”.
The argument culminated when he pushed her and she “landed against the toilet door”.
Then he hit her “three or four times”. “I regretted it straight away,” he told the policeman. “I tried cleaning her up. I wiped her face. I was apologising to her ... I panicked a little bit, because she was not responding to me.”
“How hard did you hit her?“Ware asked. “Hard enough for it to hurt. Hard enough to hurt her,” Coburn replied.
“What were you thinking?”
“I was not thinking. I was angry.” “What pushed you over the edge? “I’m not too sure.”
Later, Coburn said Tutemahurangi had told him to “pack up my shit and go”. “What was the last thing she said?” “Probably that.”
Prior to that interview, at the time he arrested Coburn, Ware asked what had happened in the bedroom.
“I did everything,” Coburn replied. As Coburn signed his documents, the detective noticed he was left-handed, and there was a redness on his knuckles.
The jury also heard evidence yesterday from Tracy Garratt, a St John critical care paramedic who was dispatched to the scene at Tutemahurangi’s home in Kahikatea Drive in Hamilton.
She spoke of her initial impressions of finding the injured woman in a bedroom, where a colleague had already started to perform CPR on her.
She was “very critical, unlikely to survive”. Her heart was “already ... in a flatline rhythm”.
Tutemahurangi’s right eye had completely swollen over. The pupil of her left eye was “dilated and unreactive to light ... an indication the brain had stopped working“.
“It appeared she had been beaten substantially to cause that kind of injury.”
The trial, before Justice Mary Peters, will continue today, with the closing arguments of Mann and Laybourn.
Coburn has elected not to give or call evidence in his own defence.