'I'm struggling to breathe': Dying gang member conscious and moving when help arrived

St John ambulance took Peter Lui to Hawke's Bay Hospital. Photo / NZME

Mortally wounded gang member Peter Lui was talking and moving when the first emergency services reached him after he was stabbed last year, but soon became unconscious.

"I'm struggling to breathe," Lui told Senior Constable Dominie Cresswell, the first police officer to reach him after he had been stabbed multiple times outside the Outlaws Motorcycle Club pad in Napier on March 29, 2021.

"He was really distressed and there was clearly a lot of blood around him," Cresswell told a murder trial in the High Court at Napier on Wednesday.

But she said that as she knelt down beside the injured man, Lui lifted himself onto one elbow.

A second patrol car arrived, and Cresswell and another police officer put a tourniquet on Lui's badly injured right arm.

The court has been told that Lui had been followed through Napier by two men in a maroon Holden car who rammed him off his bike outside the gang pad in Mersey Street, Pandora, attacked him, and took the Outlaws gang patch he was wearing.

St John paramedic Geoffrey Taylor said that when he arrived he found Lui lying on the ground, conscious and moving and trying to get up, but unable to do so.

"He was talking to me like anyone else would, except that he was … struggling to breathe," Taylor said.

Taylor said he cut Lui's shirt off to ascertain injuries and found stab wounds on Lui's arms, face and hand. He put another tourniquet on Lui's arm.

Lui, 63, was able to stand with assistance and got onto a stretcher, but Taylor said he had "obviously bled out a lot", was short of fluids and in pain.

"He quickly became unconscious and unresponsive," Taylor said.

Lui's blood pressure dropped to very low and became unreadable, and he didn't have a pulse.

The ambulance staff worked to get fluid back into the injured man because "you can't restore circulation without fluid to circulate", Taylor said.

A statement read to the court from a doctor at Hawke's Bay Hospital said that Lui had no pulse and no cardiac output when he arrived at the emergency department, despite the paramedics' efforts to maintain an airway and perform CPR.

Lui could not be resuscitated.

The court was read a post-mortem examination report which found that Lui died from blood loss and detailed 13 wounds and incisions, mainly to his arms, but also to his nose, hand and chest.

Hemi Rapata Meihana Cahill, 30, has pleaded not guilty to being a party to Lui's murder, and assault using a motor vehicle as a weapon.

He has pleaded guilty to the aggravated robbery of Lui's Outlaw motorcycle club patch.

The trial jury has been told that Cahill's associate, Belmont Sonny Freedom Eruiti Te Aonui-Tawhai, 23, has separately pleaded guilty to murder, aggravated robbery and assault with a weapon.

The trial before Justice Christine Grice and a jury of seven women and five men is continuing.