The Hawke’s Bay-based whānau of killed toddler Casino-Rockk Ataria-Wharehinga say they were ignored by Oranga Tamariki and cut out of her life when she was sent to Gisborne to live with relatives she had never met.
When she was finally brought back to Napier, it was in a coffin. James Pocock reports.
Trish Puna smiles with tears in her eyes as she shows a video of her niece Casino-Rockk Ataria-Wharehinga tottering through Clive Square wearing the pink dress she bought the toddler.
Casino turns to the camera, gives a quick grin.
“Look at how happy she is,” Puna says. “She was a very smart and very cheeky baby, clever as, all of that.”
It was the last time Puna would see her bright and bubbly niece alive.
Two days later, on November 13, 2021, she was taken away by Oranga Tamariki to be placed in the care of relatives in Gisborne after her mother, Samantha Wharehinga, was imprisoned.
Eight weeks later, in early 2022, 19-month-old Casino returned to Napier in a coffin, beaten to death by her Gisborne-based uncle.
Puna decided to approach Hawke’s Bay Today on behalf of the Ataria whānau after she saw the story of the former voluntary Oranga Tamariki (OT) caregiver who came forward to share her concerns about how OT handled Casino’s case.
Oranga Tamariki has again been asked several questions about the case by Hawke’s Bay Today. It remains firm on its stance of not commenting on the case.
It says it cannot comment on any circumstances because, despite the case having gone through the courts, the killing of Casino could still be the subject of a coronial inquiry.
A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said the Coroner was considering what action might be taken but had not made a decision yet.
Puna, sister-in-law to Casino’s father, Rob Ataria, had intermittently looked after Casino with her partner Turei Ataria and nieces Kohine and Nikita (Casino’s first cousins) since Casino was 2 months old.
Puna explained that Rob Ataria, a Mongrel Mob member, was in and out of prison but had given his consent for them to look after Casino.
She claimed it was an arrangement that had also worked for Casino’s mother.
While it remains unclear how Casino ended up in the care of her uncle Te Ngahuru Maxwell McClutchie and her maternal aunt Amy Wharehinga, Casino’s mother’s twin sister, Puna revealed that Casino was originally placed with her maternal grandmother, with the consent of Samantha Wharehinga, after Samatha was arrested.
In the weeks that followed, Puna said, she and her whānau made numerous efforts to reach out to the other side of the whānau and OT to find out where Casino had been taken and see if they could come to a care arrangement.
But they say they were met with silence.
Puna says by the time they found out where Casino was, she was dying in Starship children’s hospital in Auckland.
Puna believes OT has not taken responsibility for what she believes is serious negligence that led to Casino’s death.
Puna says the first thing she did when she learned Casino was going to live with her maternal grandmother in Gisborne was to rush to her and OT staff to try to convince them to change their minds.
“I went there and tried to convince them to ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ because this baby is our baby too. You can’t just take our baby and suddenly we’re not part of this,” Puna said.
She had concerns because Casino had never left Napier before and had never met her Gisborne relatives.
They requested a family group conference between both sides of the whānau, OT and the police to decide how to care for Casino.
“They didn’t want to meet us, the decision was made there and then for her to go to Gisborne, but they were going to have a meeting with us in three weeks which was all we could get from them,” Puna said.
“When we decided to let [Casino] go, we could have fought for her but we believed in their word that we were going to have a chance to take her back.”
Two weeks later they learnt Amy Wharehinga and McClutchie had taken Casino from her maternal grandmother.
“We couldn’t find her. No one would give us an address, no one would give us a phone number,” she said.
“Oranga Tamariki didn’t want a bar of us. Every time we tried to go to Oranga Tamariki we were always shut out.”
The family group conference did not happen and Puna did not learn where Casino was until six weeks later, close to Christmas 2021.
“By the time we could get to her, she was gone. It was the hardest thing ever to hear,” she said.
“We feel partly guilty for what happened because it feels like we didn’t fight hard enough for her.”
Justice Andru Isac’s sentencing notes show that just one of Wharehinga and McClutchie’s five children, aged from 8 months to 9 years, was legally allowed to be in their day-to-day care.
McClutchie and Amy Wharehinga were both addicted to alcohol, cannabis and methamphetamine.
McClutchie assaulted Casino on December 19, 2021, giving her a significant head injury, which caused extensive bruising to her head, neck and shoulder, fractures to her ribs, vertebral compression fractures, swelling to her head and symptoms consistent with concussion.
McClutchie and Amy Wharehinga did nothing to get medical treatment, blamed the injuries on one of their other children and cancelled an appointment at the local medical centre.
On January 6, 2022, McClutchie was once again the only adult at home when he assaulted Casino again and left her with multiple bruises on both sides of her head, bleeding in her eyes, an injury to her brain stem, bruising to her chest and abdomen and a liver laceration.
Several of her ribs were also fractured and McClutchie again blamed the injuries on another child.
Casino was taken to Gisborne Hospital by ambulance and transferred to Starship, where she died four days later.
A homicide investigation began shortly afterwards and McClutchie and Amy Wharehinga were charged over to her death later that year.
McClutchie was convicted of manslaughter for the January 6 assault and neglect of a child and causing grievous harm with reckless disregard for the head injuries caused by the earlier incident.
He was jailed for eight years and two months in May.
Amy Wharehinga had earlier pleaded guilty to a child neglect charge.
Casino, who has whakapapa to Hawke’s Bay iwi Ngāti Kahungunu, was sent home to Napier and her tangi was held at Puna’s house where her body was kept for three days.
“[Wharehinga and McClutchie] didn’t know what to do at a tangi, they didn’t know what marae she should go to, they had no idea where to take this baby. But they were happy to keep her at our house which is nice for us,” Puna said.
Her whānau then again decided to confront OT about how they had handled the case.
“They didn’t check on baby, they didn’t check on where she was going to, they didn’t check on the background of these people,” she said.
“We got hold of Oranga Tamariki to tell them that ‘this is what you have done and we are going to come and get you because you were negligent with this baby, you didn’t care where she went to, you didn’t care about checking in on the people she was with’.”
The last time Puna had direct contact with OT was when a representative visited her home shortly after Casino’s body was returned.
“She looked frightened to come up our driveway,” Puna said.
“I said, ‘Let’s do this properly, we’ll bring her in, we’ll welcome her’. She didn’t want to see baby, come and view her in her coffin in our house.
“All she did was give us an envelope with $300 in it and said, ‘This is from Oranga Tamariki’.”
Puna said it wasn’t about the money, but she found the gesture inadequate given the circumstances and believed it showed a lack of compassion from OT.
“If that’s how they think it is going to stop, with $300 hush money or ‘I’m sorry’ money – whatever – it didn’t go down well.”
Puna said Casino’s father was “broken” by the news of his little girl’s death. He had not been around for much of her upbringing due to his time in prison but he was allowed out to see her body.
“As a male, he didn’t really speak much. He was hurt,” she said.
“He had asked us to take his baby and it haunts me every time. He rang up and said, ‘Trish, please take my baby. Don’t let her go to Gisborne, because she won’t be a number one baby she will be a number however many babies they have got. They won’t love her like you [all] love her.’”
She said Ataria had told her he feared McClutchie, who has Black Power affiliations, would hurt Casino because of the rivalry between Black Power and Mongrel Mob, which Rob has connections to, and she believed OT failed to investigate this possibility when sending her to Gisborne.
“Rob said things like, ‘He is in Black Power Trish, he’ll hurt my baby’. Rob kind of saw this coming before it happened and I feel guilty for that.”
Children’s Minister Karen Chhour said she could not comment on the specifics of the case while the coroner had not made a decision, but she spoke with Hawke’s Bay Today about OT policy in general.
“While I can’t talk about this case specifically, what I can say is that Oranga Tamariki doesn’t need to wait for a coroner’s report to make changes,” Chhour said.
“There is a process, they do rapid reviews when something like this happens to see if there was a gap in the care or decision-making that happened around that tragedy.”
She said reports had made the same recommendations for decades but progress had not been made.
“We’ve had so many reports and after Malachi [Subecz] I had to ask the question, ‘What is another report going to do?’”
Since becoming a minister, Chhour said, she had asked what regular checks on the children of incarcerated parents might look like, as per the recommendation in Dame Karen Poutasi’s report on Malachi’s death.
“If you have incarcerated that do have children, there should be some kind of standard process around what happens. Who has got the child for starters, do we know where they are and do we know that they are safe?
“I don’t understand yet whether it is a practice issue or a legislation issue. If it is a legislation issue then we will need to go down the road of changing that legislation.”
She said she was willing to debate the necessity of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act, which prioritised the placement of uplifted children with whānau, because of the repeated failures she saw in decision-making around tragedies.
“Sometimes, unfortunately, whānau are not the safest option. We have to be sure that when we are doing return to home or we are removing young people and putting them back with whānau, that we are very, very sure that is the best decision.”
She said the removal of 7AA would “absolutely not” impact what Ngāti Kahungunu was trying to achieve with its Te Ara Mātua initiative and “not one more child” anti-uplift policy.
Puna said she felt “little people” in Oranga Tamariki care needed a voice and after Casino’s death she wants to help give them one.
“We are never going to see her again, we are never going to see what could have become of her.
“We miss her dearly and we wish that this would never have to happen to anybody. Nobody should have to go through this, it is really unfair.
“They failed our Casino big time.”
James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on the environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz
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