Girl, 16, jailed for deadly stabbing
Grandfather was killed after he found teenagers breaking into his vehicle
I reach over at night and then realise that it’s real, this nightmare is real.
Vicki-Lee Reihana
AHamilton teenager who fatally stabbed a man during a scuffle over a car break-in has been jailed. The 16-year-old girl was found guilty of unlawfully killing Norman Kingi, 54.
The teenager, who has permanent name suppression, was with two other teenage girls when the stabbing occurred. She was sentenced yesterday in the High Court at Hamilton.
One co-accused had charges dropped while the other, aged 14, was found not guilty at the trial in October.
The teenagers had spent hours breaking into cars before arriving on Ranui St about 11.30pm on July 28 last year.
After a brief confrontation with Kingi and his partner, the 16-year-old girl stabbed Kingi in the heart with a knife outside his home, before fleeing with the 14-year-old. They were found a short time later by police.
After acknowledging the wha¯nau of Kingi and the teenager, Justice Timothy Brewer told them no sentence he imposed would bring Kingi back.
Victim impact statements were read. Vicki-Lee Reihana spoke of struggling to continue after losing her soulmate.
In her statement, read by Crown prosecutor Philip Morgan QC, she said her partner was her backbone and the three girls who broke into their car that night would never know how much they loved each other and the impact his death had on their wha¯nau.
“I still cry sad, silent tears . . . I reach over at night and then realise that it’s real, this nightmare is real.”
Without Kingi’s wha¯nau, she said she would have struggled to continue. She described him as a man with a great work ethic, who loved country music, sports, his children and grandchildren.
Inscribed on his gravestone were the words, “If he loved you, he loved you well”.
“What more can I say,” she said. The teenager’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield, urged the judge to let her serve her sentence in a youth detention facility where she would initially go until aged 18.
There was no dispute about what happened, and six weeks before trial his client acknowledged causing Kingi’s death and wanted to plead guilty to manslaughter, he said.
That was turned down by the Crown but Mansfield said she was still entitled to a 20 per cent discount on her sentence for the prior admission.
He said she had felt a sense of loyalty to try to persuade the adults to let her friend go: “But from that point on everything went terribly wrong.”
She acted impulsively and dangerously but did not intend to kill.
The teen had also been regarded as being at a low risk of reoffending.
Justice Brewer said he accepted both what the Crown and defence said but found there was a reasonable possibility she felt she might be grabbed by Kingi and get “a hiding”.
“Your actions were not thought out in advance. Your actions were not deliberate in the sense that you had not set out to stab Mr Kingi,” he said.
The judge described the scene as “a quickly changing and very tense environment”.
“It was dark, there was shouting and your [friend] was being physically restrained.”
He took a starting point of six years’ jail before offering discounts for her upbringing and that she was at a rebellious point in her life; she had been truant a lot and had come into contact with local “trouble-makers” who taught her how to break into cars which she thought was “cool”.
Justice Brewer gave the teenager a 35 per cent discount for her youth, 15 per cent for an offer of a manslaughter guilty plea before trial and five months for time spent on electronically monitored bail.
He arrived at a sentence of two years and 11 months.
The judge also granted permanent name suppression.