Andrew Laurie Montgomerie leaves Auckland District Court in 2021 after a hearing relating to his wounding charge. The property developer is now on trial. Photo / NZME
It was less of a brutal blow – more like a “fluid, beautiful movement”, as if genteelly flicking a glass of champagne into someone’s face.
That is how a witness described the moment at a ritzy Westmere party five years ago when property developer Andrew Laurie Montgomerie – on trial for wounding with reckless disregard – cut the neck of a property industry colleague with whom there was a longstanding business disagreement.
The woman said she had been standing in the backyard of the seaside mansion that Friday night in April 2021, and briefly turned her gaze to both acquaintances, wondering how they knew each other.
She noticed the movement seconds later.
“[The complainant] just sort of grabbed his neck and he dropped down, and he ran,” the woman said, recalling that she thought to herself: “What just happened? This is so weird”.
She then voiced similar sentiments to the person she had been chatting with.
“I think Mont just hit [the complainant] with a champagne glass,” she said, referring to the defendant by his nickname.
Neither the witness nor the complainant can currently be named.
Both have sought permanent name suppression, which will be decided by Judge Paul Murray after the Auckland District Court trial concludes.
Jurors watched pre-recorded testimony from the witness this morning as Crown prosecutors Ruby van Boheemen and Isabella Joe wrapped up their third and final day of evidence.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC is expected to present his case tomorrow, including calling Montgomerie, 58, to the witness box to give his own account of that evening.
So far, jurors’ only chances to hear Montgomerie in his own words have been a brief text exchange and a seven-sentence written statement that he handed to police in lieu of an interview, on the day he was charged.
Both were read aloud in court today.
“While I was at the party a person whom I know approached me and began insulting me,” the statement read.
“I went to walk away, [and] as I was walking away he threw a punch towards my head - my instinctive reaction was to raise my right arm and fend him away.
“He walked back towards a group of people.
“I then realised my right hand was bleeding badly and realised I had a spirits glass in my hand which had smashed.”
In the text exchange, extracted from Montgomerie’s phone after police seized the device, a friend from Barfoot & Thompson told him the afternoon after the incident that there were “some interesting rumours floating around” about the defendant.
“Yep. Just gossip by nobody that saw what really happened,” Montgomerie replied.
“The guy punched me and came off second best and is now crying about it.”
The friend replied: “thats a bit disappointing as the story i heard was far more exotic.” He elaborated: “champagne glass to the neck artery”.
“Nah,” Montgomerie responded. “It was a vodka glass and unfortunately I was holding it when I hit him. Done plenty of damage to me too.”
But the mutual acquaintance witness – the only person aside from the complainant and the defendant known to have seen the interaction – said she did not see either man cocking his arm as if to inflict a blow.
She described their body language just before the incident as “nothing remarkable”.
“They weren’t pushing each other or anything,” she explained.
“It just looked like they were having a conversation – maybe about something serious... They weren’t having a jovial catch-up.”
That’s what made what happened next all the more startling, she said, pantomiming Montgomerie’s hand.
“It was like a flick,” she said.
“Like someone would slap you across the face but there wasn’t really a wind-up.”
Prosecutors suggested at the outset of the trial last week that Montgomerie “saw red” and lashed out without warning after the other man humiliated him by suggesting he had a reputation for not paying bills.
The complainant said he was looking away when he was hit by Montgomerie, and it felt like the defendant was intentionally pushing the jagged glass into his neck to apply maximum pressure.
The defence, meanwhile, suggested he was embellishing out of spite for Montgomerie.
Mansfield has characterised the cut as an accident and has suggested the complainant was the initial aggressor.
The defence lawyer has also focused heavily on the complainant’s admitted cocaine use, which the complainant said he had fleetingly indulged in earlier when someone at the party was passing around a plate of small, pre-arranged lines.
Jurors also heard today, via a statement of agreed facts, from a surgeon at Auckland Hospital on the night of the incident.
He described a 2.5cm deep laceration that damaged the muscle in the patient’s neck. It was deep enough, he noted, that exploratory surgery was needed to see if there was “potential injury to structures deep in the neck”.
Ultimately, he determined, the cut did not pose the risk of being fatal, and there were no glass fragments in the external jugular vein.
There had been fear among some first responders and partygoers, including the complainant, that it could have been much worse.
The mutual acquaintance witness recalled following the complainant inside immediately after the incident to see if he was okay.
“He looked scared, sort of a bit pale,” she recalled.
“And then [his wife] let out this shrieking wail, and the whole party was just like, ‘What?’.”
Police and an ambulance crew showed up a short time later.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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