Epapara Poutapu (inset) was fatally stabbed at an Albany bus station in September last year. Photo / Dean Purcell inset
Epapara Poutapu (inset) was fatally stabbed at an Albany bus station in September last year. Photo / Dean Purcell inset
Warning: This story contains distressing content
A 17-year-old murder defendant admitted to killing 24-year-old Epapara Poutapu with a knife in September 2023.
The defendant claims he acted in self-defence after Poutapu allegedly confronted him and his friends.
Prosecutors argue the teen intentionally or recklessly caused Poutapu’s death.
“Oh f***. Oh, that’s no good.”
Those were the thoughts a 16-year-old murder defendant recalled racing through his mind after throwing a punch – with a kitchen paring knife gripped in his fist – at a stranger, who immediately started spurting blood outsidean Albany bus terminal last year.
The 18cm knife had been thrust into 24-year-old Epapara Poutapu’s neck with such force that the tip of the blade was later found lodged in his vertebrae during a post-mortem examination, jurors were told today in the High Court at Auckland as prosecutors finished presenting evidence in the teen’s trial.
The defendant, now 17 and with continuing name suppression, elected to give evidence immediately after the Crown closed. He then admitted to being the person who killed Poutapu on the afternoon of September 18, 2023 – a violent exchange, caught on grainy CCTV footage, that lasted only seconds but has been slowed down, zoomed and played repeatedly throughout the week-long trial.
Prosecutors allege the teen knew what he was doing when he approached Poutapu with the knife. They said he either intentionally killed the stranger or recklessly intended to cause injury knowing that death was likely. Either option, if found to be true, would equate to murder.
The teen’s lawyers, meanwhile, repeated today that he acted in defence of himself or his friends. Even if jurors find it wasn’t self-defence, the teen reacted to a tense, fast-moving situation without thinking and didn’t anticipate that death might occur, lawyer Barbara Hunt said during her brief opening address.
It was a sentiment often repeated from the witness box.
“It just happened,” the teen said over and over again as lawyers on both sides had him walk step-by-step through what happened that day.
Epapara Poutapu, 24, was fatally stabbed by a 16-year-old after the two strangers faced off to fight at an Albany bus station in September 2023. Photo / Dean Purcell
The defendant said he was en route to a BP petrol station to get cigarettes with his girlfriend and a 19-year-old friend named Noah. They were waiting for the next bus at the busy North Shore transport hub when they first encountered Poutapu that afternoon.
Poutapu, who had schizophrenia and might have been off his medication around that time, has been described by family and mental health professionals as showing signs of paranoia, auditory hallucinations and muttering to himself.
The defendant said he approached Poutapu after the stranger was seen “stepping out on” his friend – trying to instigate a fight.
“[Poutapu] was just saying to him, like, ‘Huh?! What?!’” the teen recalled, describing the man as having an angry, confrontational tone but then walking away.
“I walked over to ask him if we were all good ... and what his problem was,” the teen testified, describing his exact words to Poutapu as: “Are we all day?”
He said he was “a little bit nervous” but not afraid at that point. His intention, he said, was to talk it out so they could all share the bus station peacefully.
“Why are you stepping out, my bro?” he said he asked the man.
Poutapu allegedly responded with nonsensical “jibber jabber” which made the teen think he might be “a crackhead”, he told jurors.
“What?! Huh, bro?! Huh, bro?! What?! What?!” he recalled the 24-year-old saying. “What, you wanna go, bro?”
The defendant said he responded: “It’s all good. Calm down.”
Police investigate a stabbing at the Albany bus station in September 2023. Photo / Dean Purcell
At that point, the teen said, the man went to put down his coat and bag and squared off into a fighting stance. The teen also hunched over, as if preparing to fight, CCTV footage shows.
“At that stage I felt, like, scared,” he told jurors today. “I felt, like, lost. I didn’t know what to do. At that stage, I thought, ‘He’s going to get me.’”
The teen had his hands in his pockets, where he acknowledged he had put the knife. He had grabbed the knife as he left the hotel he was staying at earlier that day. His friend had been jumped and robbed by Black Power gang members at the motel the day earlier, so it was for protection as they left, he said.
But even though his hands were in his pocket as he squared off with the man, he wasn’t holding the knife or even thinking about it, he insisted.
“He was just coming at me with his hands up,” the teen said. “I was thinking the same thing: ‘What’s going on?’ And then I was thinking about my friends. I was thinking about, ‘Is he going to actually hurt me or is he just screwing up to me?’”
The teen said the man punched him in the face with a hook and he kicked the man in response.
“I then punched him,” the teen said, pausing before adding, “with a knife in my hand.”
Police investigate a stabbing at the Albany bus station in Sept 2023. Photo / Dean Purcell
He insisted he was thinking “nothing” as he threw the punch.
“I was just scared,” he said. “It just happened and I was reacting.”
It’s when he saw cuts on the man’s face that he said he realised: “Oh no, this is real. This is happening.”
He didn’t run away because he was worried about his friends’ safety, he said, but he expected the man to walk away after the cuts to his face. Instead, he recalled, the man “looked very angry” and advanced again, throwing a high kick to the defendant’s head.
“I ducked down and threw my overhand – it just happened,” he said, describing the stream of conscious narrative that had been going through his mind just before the deadly blow: “What’s going on? What the f? This dude, something’s wrong with him. Who does that? Who’s just so persistent in getting someone like that?”
He spun around and ran away, he said, realising a short time later that his throbbing hand was bleeding. He asked to borrow a stranger’s phone so he could call his mum then asked the stranger to flag down police, he said.
“I was very upset. I was crying,” he recalled. “In my words, I felt like shit. I don’t know how to explain it any other way.”
Police bandaged his hand and he told them a “crazy guy” had attacked him at the bus station. They offered to take him to the hospital but he declined, saying his mother would do it. He recalled throwing the bloody knife out the window as his mother drove him to North Shore Hospital in Takapuna. He decided not to go into the hospital, opting for a shower at home instead.
A police dive team would later find the knife in Lake Pupuke, which borders the hospital. The knife, since secured in a thick clear plastic case, was placed into evidence today.
The knife used to kill Epapara Poutapu, 24, at an Albany bus station in September last year was entered into evidence in the High Court at Auckland during the trial of a 17-year-old who inflicted the fatal blow. The teen, whose name is suppressed, said he was acting in self-defence. Photo / Craig Kapitan
After seeing a headline that Poutapu had died, the teen said he asked his mother to take him to the police station.
During cross-examination, Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock noted that Poutapu, although older, would have been about 11kg lighter than the defendant at the time. She pointed out that Poutapu had walked away after exchanging words with the defendant’s friend. It was the defendant, she said, who then confronted Poutapu.
“One option for you was to walk away, wasn’t it? ... To simply not go near Mr Poutapu at all?” McClintock asked. “It was a choice of yours to approach him.”
The defendant agreed but insisted his intention was to calm matters down. He denied the prosecutor’s suggestions that he was trying to “bait” the stranger into a fight or that he was making sport of picking on the man because he was weird.
“I was trying to get through to him, ‘We’ve all got to stand around here ... I don’t want to walk around on eggshells while waiting for a bus,’” he explained. “What if I ran away and then he caught up to me or he caught up to my friends and he attacked us from behind?”
The prosecutor pointed out that other witnesses recounted hearing the words, “Do you want to get f***ed up?” and “You’re f***ing dead.” The defendant again insisted the only words that came from his mouth were intended to de-escalate the situation.
The Crown is expected to continue cross-examining the defendant when the trial resumes tomorrow before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.
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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