CITY HOMICIDE - Hundreds say farewell to battered teenager

Up to 1000 people gathered in the Hokianga yesterday to pay their respects to slain teenager Mairina Dunn, as police stepped up their hunt for a gang member who has been on the run since her death.
The emotional funeral service was held at the Hato Keiti church in Waihou and the 17-year-old was later laid to rest next to her much-loved grandmother, Regina "Chicken" Dunn, at the Purere cemetery.
Mairina was found dead in a house in the Whangarei suburb of Otangarei on Sunday after being beaten with a blunt instrument for more than an hour and a half.
A veteran police officer described it as violence on an unimaginable scale.
Black Power member Nathan Fenton, 31, who was in a brief relationship with Ms Dunn and was living with her and three others in a rented house at the time of the death, is the focus of a murder inquiry.
Police yesterday would not confirm whether Fenton would be charged with her murder, or that he had been taking methamphetamine.
More than a dozen houses have been searched in the hunt for Fenton, who is understood to have associates in Auckland and Whangarei. There have been unconfirmed sightings of him as far north as Kawakawa and as far south as Huntly.
Yesterday Ms Dunn's great uncle, Charlie Dunn, said up to 1000 people turned out for the funeral.
He hoped Fenton would give himself up peacefully.
"All I can say is that he needs to give himself up and time will tell what's going to happen to him.
"There's not going to be any recriminations from our family," said Mr Dunn, a former New Zealand heavyweight boxing champion.
The family had sympathy for the wanted man's family.
"They must be suffering the same way we are," he said.
"I don't know if any of his family arrived (at the tangi) but I had hoped to express our feelings to them. We know how families suffer and this time it's our family."
The teenager's casket, which had been open as she lay at Waimirirangi Marae at Waihou in the Hokianga, was closed by family members before yesterday's funeral.
Her mother, Queenie Dunn, wanted the casket open to ensure the young people who paid their respects saw the 17-year-old's battered and broken body.
"We all knew that Mairina had been in trouble with the police and she had a lot of friends that were sort of taking the same path," Mr Dunn said.
"Her mother wanted them to see what had been done to her and maybe they learned something from it."
Mairina had been extremely close to her grandmother and had gone off the rails when she died several years ago.
"She started roaming around the town drinking and smoking - doing all the things she shouldn't have been doing."
He said his niece had been "everyone's favourite" in the family.
"Everybody loved her and that has showed over the last couple of days. She trusted everybody and made a lot of friends.
"She was a loving person," Mr Dunn said.
Whangarei police Detective Sergeant Marty Ruth, who is heading a 45-strong homicide team, said he was confident Fenton would be caught. There had been good developments but he would not say what they were.