A dispute over a popular-branded Geedup hoodie, similar to the one pictured, led to a teenage girl being charged with robbery and appearing at the Youth Court at Tauranga.
A dispute over a popular-branded Geedup hoodie, similar to the one pictured, led to a teenage girl being charged with robbery and appearing at the Youth Court at Tauranga.
This story is about a Youth Court hearing which is subject to statutory suppressions. Names have been changed to protect identities.
A teenage girl claims she was “kicked in the head” by another teen after she refused to hand over a $700 Geedup hoodie she’d been given as a giftfor Christmas.
But the other teen claims they agreed to swap clothing and the girl only complained after being questioned by her grandmother about why she went out in an expensive hoodie and came home in a $40 puffer jacket.
The case ended up in the Youth Court in Tauranga where it was up to a judge to decide who was telling the truth – Jessie, the girl who owned the hoodie, or Kiri, who was charged with robbery after allegedly using violence to gain the hoodie.
She said she was sitting on the floor and Kiri was sat on the end of the bed before the alleged assault.
Jessie said she could tell “something bad was about to happen” and then Kiri “lent back and kicked me in the head”.
She’d been “booted” in the middle of the forehead with Kiri’s left foot and had “seen stars”.
She told the court she hadn’t wanted to be assaulted further, so she took off her hoodie and gave it to Kiri.
The girl then left the house with a puffer jacket that Kiri had “thrown” at her after she’d received the Geedup.
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Mutual friends and smoking session
Jessie said she met up with Kiri, whom she’d become acquainted with online through a mutual friend, after they’d messaged over social media about having a cannabis-smoking “session”.
They both agreed that Jessie had brought a bong, but Jessie said she hadn’t provided any “weed” because she’d been looking for someone to “shout” her a session.
Kiri said they both had “tinnies” and, after meeting near Mount Maunganui’s Bayfair mall, the pair had gone to her cousin’s house nearby.
The two girls, and Kiri’s cousin, had been smoking when things allegedly came to a head.
Jessie said Kiri began to repeatedly ask her for her $700 “Handstyle Geedup” hoodie, which she’d received as a present from her mother.
The Geedup hoodies range in price, but typically cost hundreds of dollars. The complainant in the Youth Court trial said her mother paid $700 for the hoodie, a couple of years ago, and gave it to her for Christmas.
After the alleged assault, Jessie said she headed back to Bayfair to catch a bus home and had been messaging her mum as she walked.
She read out messages produced as evidence. The first one she sent about the alleged interaction with Kiri said: “She literally kicked me in the head”.
Jessie was taken to the doctor a “couple of days later” where she reported symptoms of a minor concussion, but no visible injuries were noted.
Defence: A regretted clothing swap
The defence put to Jessie there had been no assault, and that there had simply been a clothing swap between the girls that she later regretted.
“Isn’t it the case that you actually agreed to swap the hoodie with the puffer jacket until the next day, when you were going to swap back?” Kiri’s lawyer Mary-Ann McCarty said during cross-examination.
“That is not what happened because I would not swap my $700 hoodie for something that looked like a $40 puffer jacket,” Jessie replied.
McCarty asked if, when she went home with the “$40 puffer jacket on”, her grandmother had asked where the hoodie was.
“She was furious because she knew that you had swapped a $700 hoodie for a $40 puffer jacket.”
“Actually, she was furious at the fact I had been kicked in the head and my hoodie had been taken,” Jessie said.
McCarty said when faced with the anger of her grandmother at swapping clothes, Jessie had made up that story.
Jessie denied this, but didn’t have an explanation for why she’d taken the puffer jacket, or been offered it, if the hoodie had been taken by force.
She told McCarty she hadn’t been affected by the cannabis and was still “pretty straight” at the time of the assault.
Kiri told the court she hadn’t assaulted Jessie, and that she’d been surprised when Jessie’s uncle had turned up to collect the jersey that night, as the plan had been to swap back at Bayfair the next day.
She said if she had kicked her, she would have “owned up to it”.
Judge Louis Bidois pointed to text messages between Jessie and her mother and said that “they don’t tell the whole story”.
“The exchange does not include the fact that the jersey had been taken, albeit there is the comment ‘$700 down the drain’... There’s obviously further context, other messages, so effectively they are selective.”
There was no evidence from “a cousin” who was present throughout the incident, nor from Jessie’s uncle, who had recovered the jersey and returned the puffer jacket.
The question for the judge was who he believed.
While Jessie was “far more articulate” than Kiri, that didn’t mean she was more truthful, the judge said.
Judge Bidois said he found that Jessie was “probably telling the truth” but he couldn’t discount Kiri’s denial.
He found the charge was not proven and dismissed it.
HannahBartlettis a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
