A violent armed home invasion saw children terrified as a bloodied, screaming woman was dragged from a North Shore property by her hair and held captive for two hours.
In the initial melee, a gun was fired toward a well-known figure in Auckland’s drug rehabilitation scene and one of the assailants was shot in the leg.
Details of the bizarre incident were outlined in detail for the first time today as kidnappers Jamie Maihi Perfect, Ralph Park and Janaya Aroha Ashby Edwards were sentenced in Auckland District Court to prison.
A fourth co-defendant, Kim McKee, was sentenced to supervision for a less serious charge of being an accessory after the fact.
“This was, in my view, a particularly nasty incident and you led the charge,” Judge Kathryn Maxwell told Perfect, a 501 deportee who she sentenced to five years and two months’ imprisonment.
Court documents suggest Perfect, 34, was trying to settle a grievance over a debt during the April 2 raid last year.
The exact nature of the alleged debt remains unknown, but Judge Maxwell noted: “It’s not lost on the court that if you were recovering a debt, you were probably drug dealing as well”.
The group was specifically targeting Sharna Walker, who lived in a sleepout at a Beach Haven home where Ahikaa Trust bail facility director Elaine Ngamu also lived. The two had met through the bail facility, and Perfect had previously stayed there.
Perfect, Park and Ashby Edwards burst into the home disguised by masks, hats and hoods as the residents were cooking dinner about 7.20pm.
Perfect pointed a loaded shotgun at another woman’s chest and asked where Walker was before pushing Ngamu out of the way and searching the house, court documents state.
The woman who had the gun pointed at her tried unsuccessfully to pull the mask off Ashby Edwards’ face before retreating to a neighbour’s house with the children.
Ngamu, meanwhile, threw an object at an assailant’s head.
“Mr Perfect turned towards Ms Ngamu, pointed the gun at her and fired a round into a nearby exterior wall,” the agreed summary of facts for all four defendants states.
“He yelled something at Ms Ngamu and she ran and hid in another room.”
Perfect then grabbed Walker with one hand while holding the loaded gun in the other.
“At the time Ms Walker was dragged from the house, her face was covered in blood,” court documents state.
“As she was dragged through the gate, Ms Walker grabbed onto the side of the fence briefly in an attempt to stop herself being taken, but her hand was soon dislodged by the three defendants.”
She was forced into a car, where she remained for two hours as the defendants drove around the North Shore.
Court documents don’t state exactly how Park ended up being shot in the leg. Police have previously speculated he was shot “either by his own achievements or accidentally by his accomplice”. But the agreed summary of facts states he was shot by an occupant of the house. Defence lawyer Jasper Rhodes noted today that he was seen on CCTV limping from the house with a trail of blood as the trio left.
Rhodes asked the judge for a reduction to his client’s sentence to account for the gunshot wound.
He suffers lingering pain, which will make a prison sentence more difficult, the lawyer argued.
But the judge wasn’t convinced.
“If you enter a home uninvited, disguised and one of your party has a loaded gun, chances are someone might respond - and arguably legitimately,” the judge said.
Park was dropped off at a roundabout about an hour after the incident started. He called McKee, his partner, for help and she arranged for associates to pick him up.
Despite widespread media coverage of the incident, police wouldn’t arrest him until a month later, when they found the couple hiding out in a Waiheke home. Also at the home was a shotgun resembling the one used in the home invasion.
The car used in the kidnapping was eventually abandoned in Greenhithe, with the two remaining kidnappers parting ways.
“At 9.10pm, Ms Walker ran to the rear of an unknown house and knocked on the back door,” court documents state.
”The occupant opened the door as Ms Walker looked distressed and was bleeding.
“She put her finger to her mouth and indicated that he needed to remain quiet. He said he would call the police, to which she turned and ran away.”
She ran away from a second house after trying to crawl in a window, telling the occupant she needed help.
Police found her about 15 minutes later and took her to the hospital. She suffered a cut under her eye, an injury to her ankle and bruises on both arms.
She remains a hostile witness and has refused to make a statement or give a victim impact statement today, Crown prosecutor Rebekah Thompson noted.
“Is she hostile or is she terrified?” the judge asked.
Likely the latter, the prosecutor agreed.
Regardless of the victim’s participation, the judge agreed “the offending would have caused her significant psychological harm”.
“It is no wonder she has declined to be involved in the process,” she said.
Ngamu, meanwhile, submitted a victim impact letter to the court in which she said she has now stepped away from her 22-year career in drug rehabilitation as a result of that night.
She feels guilty that others in the house were put at risk, she told the court.
Perfect and Ashby Edwards were arrested the day after the kidnapping while at Headquarters, a bar in Auckland Central’s Viaduct district owned by former mayoral candidate Leo Molloy.
At today’s hearing, the judge ordered a five-year and three-month starting point for Perfect for the kidnapping charge, with an uplift of 15 months for having discharged the shotgun inside the home.
She then allowed a 10% combined discount for his background and remorse before adding another four months for offending while on bail and under intensive supervision for a previous offence.
Judge Maxwell noted that Perfect moved to Australia at age 9 and was raised in a good home but fell into the wrong crowd as a teen and ended up involved in an aggravated robbery at age 17.
He was deported back to New Zealand in 2021 and, unemployed, fell into a lifestyle of meth consumption and partying, according to a pre-sentencing report.
Park, who received a sentence of four-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, also reported methamphetamine use at the time of offending.
“It was not until you were shot in the leg that you instantly sobered up,” the judge said, referring to another pre-sentencing report.
Park said he had found himself owing money and was given an opportunity to get the debt cleared by helping Perfect.
Ashby Edwards, 30, was also described as a methamphetamine user who first went to prison at age 17. She received the lightest sentence of the three kidnappers - three years’ imprisonment - but the judge ordered her to serve it consecutively with a three-year sentence on unrelated charges that she has been serving since December.
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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