Isaiah Buchanan (left) and Ahere Gillies were found guilty by a jury of the manslaughter of Javon Aranui (inset). Photos / Ric Stevens / Supplied
Javon Aranui suffered 16 separate head injuries during a prolonged two-on-one beating at 3am on a Hastings street.
Any one of them could have caused the brain bleed that led to his death a day later, a court has been told.
“The assault on Mr Aranui was brutal. It was an attack on a vulnerable person,” Justice Peter Churchman said in the High Court at Napier.
Ahere Gillies and Isaiah Buchanan were appearing before him to be sentenced for Aranui’s manslaughter.
He told both of them their prospects of rehabilitation would be limited if they did not cut their ties with the Mongrel Mob.
Gillies, who boasted over the internet about the attack on Aranui after he died, was sent to prison for five years and five months.
Buchanan, who said he helped the injured man and gave him water when the assault was finished, received a sentence of four years and eight months.
Both men will have to serve 50% of their time before they are eligible for parole.
Angela Aranui, the dead man’s aunt, read a victim impact statement to the court in which she said her nephew was kind, funny and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
She said his life had been taken in a few minutes of unnecessary violence.
“There is no honour in what you did,” she told Gillies and Buchanan.
She said the outcome of the case would not bring Javon back and would also separate the killers from their families.
“Justice has been served but there are no winners here. This is a lose-lose situation.”
A victim impact statement from Javon’s father, John Aranui, was read to the court by another relative.
He said his son was a talented graffiti artist, a dancer and was warm, bright, caring and empathetic.
“Not a day goes by without me thinking of Javon, my son, my friend.”
Gillies and Buchanan were found not guilty of murdering Aranui, but guilty of his manslaughter after a jury trial in May.
The jury delivered the verdicts after hearing more than a week of evidence and deliberating for nearly three days.
During the trial, they heard witness accounts of the assault in Jellicoe St, Hastings – described by one as a “bloody beating” – around 3am on December 20, 2023.
The assault went on for some time. Exactly how long was a point of contention at the trial but it lasted for several minutes and the Crown contended it could have been 15 minutes.
There was never any question that Gillies and Buchanan had been involved.
Gillies accepted from the start of the trial he was responsible for the manslaughter of the 24-year-old Hastings man, who was sometimes known by his tag-name of Snake, but he denied murdering him.
Buchanan also pleaded not guilty to murder. He did not accept he could be found guilty of manslaughter, but the jury found otherwise.
The trial was told the fight started after Gillies and Buchanan laughed at Aranui, who had been chased by a dog as he cycled down their street.
Aranui went back to ask what they had been laughing at.
Buchanan said the two accused never intended to seriously hurt Aranui.
He said Aranui, who was 30kg heavier than him, threw the first punch and that he responded with kicks to the torso, but not a punch, in self-defence.
He said he tended to Aranui when he was knocked unconscious at the end of the fight, had placed his head on his duffel bag “like a pillow”, and had helped the beaten man get up when he came to again.
He said the altercation ended in a handshake when Gillies returned to the scene, and the two men gave Aranui a bottle of water.
Pathologist Dr Katherine White earlier described finding multiple injuries on both sides of Aranui’s head.
Any one of them could have caused the “dangerous volume” of bleeding inside the skull.
There were also injuries, although mainly not visible on the surface, to Aranui’s torso and his legs.
The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.
Despite the extent of his injuries, Aranui was able to get up after the altercation, which happened outside a known gang house.
Both accused men were in the Mongrel Mob.
Aranui climbed back on his bicycle and rode a short distance. He was seen riding the bike by police officers responding to a 111 call about the fight, who arrived in Jellicoe St about 3.20am.
Aranui fell off the bike in Collinge Rd, just around the corner, but was talking and walking unaided, although stumbling, when ambulance officers arrived to help him.
He also spoke to the police and ambulance staff, who noted his visible head injuries and his split lip.
They did not know at that time that Aranui was already beginning to succumb to his fatal injuries when he had the conversation.
He said he felt hot. He got out of the ambulance to urinate on the side of the road. He vomited. He told the first responders things that were not true about where he had been and how he got his injuries.
He appeared to be intoxicated, although the pathologist would later find he had no alcohol in his system.
Aranui was reluctant to be taken in the ambulance. He was worried about what might happen to his bike if it were left on the side of the street.
The police officers put the bicycle in the back of their car and said they would take it to Aranui’s home if the injured man agreed to go to hospital.
He went, but then his condition went downhill.
The ambulance stopped twice on the way to Hastings Hospital, 5.5km away, as the crew tried to stabilise Aranui’s rapidly deteriorating condition.
By the time they got to the hospital Emergency Department, about an hour after the beating, Aranui was on a breathing tube.
He was transferred to Wellington Hospital, where he died the following day.
Gillies and Buchanan were 18 and 19 at the time of the assault. Although he is slightly younger, Buchanan is Gillies’ uncle.
The court was told Gillies exerted himself so much while administering the beating to Aranui that he paused and took his sweatshirt off.
Justice Churchman said Gillies had 14 previous convictions, including two for violence. He told Gillies that if he did not sever ties with the gang, his prospects of rehabilitation were “bleak”.
The court was told Buchanan had assaulted a Corrections officer while in custody and had received a sentence of two months in prison for that.
Both men left Hastings in the days after Aranui died and police later found a social media post of Gillies in a rural location with his face covered and accompanied by the clip of a rap song entitled Murder Was the Case.
They also intercepted phone calls between the two in which they discussed a relative talking to officers, the DNA evidence, and the possibility of going to police to present Aranui’s death as manslaughter.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.