A good Samaritan fought a losing battle to choke back tears today as he recalled for jurors the frantic, hopeless attempt to save the life of stabbing victim Joshuah Tasi on a North Shore street last year.
“I noticed there were multiple stab wounds on Josh,” Michael Mainwaring said, explaining that he and two other bystanders tried to apply pressure to the wounds while calling out to him by the name they found on his driver’s licence, hoping such a personal connection might give him comfort.
“But there were so many [wounds],” he recalled, his voice quavering as he gave a vivid account of the 28-year-old victim’s last eye movement and fading pulse. “We just did our best.”
Two teens, then aged 14 and 17, are on trial in the High Court at Auckland accused of having murdered Tasi that March 2023 evening. Now aged 15 and 19, they continue to have name suppression.
“That’s what happens when you come to Beach Haven!” Mainwaring recalled one of the defendants - he’s not sure which - yelling before they both sped from the scene of the alleged road rage attack in a black BMW.
Prosecutors said during their opening address today that the “co-ordinated” stab attack witnessed by Mainwaring on Beach Haven Rd came just moments after another brief confrontation between Tasi and the teens. Tasi, driving a silver van, had first interacted with them after he pulled up behind their BMW at a T-intersection a short distance away, authorities allege. The older defendant, who was driving the BMW, was not moving at the intersection so he could talk to an acquaintance outside the car, Crown prosecutor Brett Tantrum told jurors.
“He was just beeping his horn at us,” pedestrian Sherlyene Tohu recalled of Tahi, explaining that he wanted to get around the BMW so he could turn on to Beach Haven Rd. “I was the one yelling at the car, just telling him to drive around.”
The older defendant, who was driving the BMW, didn’t seem to have much of a reaction, she said, describing his demeanour that evening as happy and relaxed.
“You f***ing dickheads!” she recalled the other driver yelling out as he manoeuvred around the BMW.
It’s around that time that the older defendant sped off in the BMW and caught up to Tasi’s vehicle, Tantrum told jurors. Both vehicles pulled over on the side of the road after the BMW cut in front of Tasi’s van, causing a rear-end crash, authorities allege.
It’s then that the young defendants are alleged to have exited the BMW, with the 17-year-old approaching the driver’s side of the van and the 14-year-old positioning himself at the passenger door, Tantrum told jurors. Witnesses who were out for a walk or watching from inside their homes that Friday evening thought they saw about 10 seconds of what appeared to be both defendants punching inside the vehicle, Tantrum said.
“Unbeknown to bystanders ... he had been repeatedly stabbed,” Tantrum said. “He died relatively quickly after [the defendants] left him.”
Mainwaring, who lived on the road, recalled hearing the crash while in his lounge and going to see what the commotion was about. The incident struck him as odd enough that he pulled out his phone to take a short video, which was played for jurors today.
As the BMW left, he called police and walked out towards the remaining van, he said, adding that he told the operator to send police and hung up as soon as he saw the blood near the van.
His partner and another bystander joined him as they tried to apply pressure to the wounds, but they couldn’t keep up with the bleeding, he said. His face was red and he wiped away tears with his shirt as he recounted the unsuccessful attempt to give CPR. People in the large courtroom gallery also wiped at their eyes.
“I returned [home] to wash the blood off myself and remove the clothes that were covered in blood,” he said. “And then I returned back outside because I knew I’d be needed by police.”
In the confusion of the moment, he hadn’t recognised Tasi. But he would later realise, he said, that he had attended college and played rugby with the victim.
Mainwaring’s partner, Olivia Stapeleton, also wept today as she recalled handing over their infant to another bystander so she could apply some of the skills she had recently learned in a first aid course.
“Oh, f***,” she meekly recalled muttering as she approached Tasi’s van.
“He was covered in blood,” she explained of the outburst. “He had a big cut on his face and his chest. It was pretty shocking.”
She recalled holding his hand as she felt the life drain out of him, his pulse coming to a stop.
“I was just trying to talk to him and tell him it was going to be okay,” she testified.
Another couple who was out for a walk in the area also recounted watching the situation unfold.
“There was a lot of movement going on ... thrusting through the windows,” Anthony McKenna said of the two young men he saw leaning into the open driver’s side and passenger windows of the van.
One of the young men, he said, was shirtless and yelling as he jumped in the air after the confrontation. The person was doing a “dog signal”, the witness said, demonstrating the gesture by pumping his fist into the air with his thumb and pinky extended. Prosecutors asked the witness to demonstrate the gesture to jurors but did not ask for an interpretation from the witness as to what the gesture might have been intended to indicate.
The witnesses partner, who sat in the witness box next, demonstrated the same hand signal as she gave a similar account.
During the three-week trial, jurors are expected to hear evidence that Tasi suffered a fatal wound to the chest but also suffered stab wounds or cuts to his forehead, face, shoulder, chest, calf and hand.
Tantrum, the prosecutor, said both defendants are charged with murder because they appear to have “orchestrated and planned” the stabbing in the immediate aftermath of the back-to-back road rage incidents.
The duo were arrested in Northland early the next morning after Tasi’s death following a tip-off and police stake-out.
Police would later discover the defendants’ fingerprints on Tasi’s van, as well as what appeared to be Tasi’s blood inside the BMW, which had been abandoned near Glenfield Rd, jurors were told.
Defence lawyer Marie Taylor-Cyphers, representing the older of the two teens, asked jurors during a short opening statement to pay close attention to the timing of what occurred that day and to consider a time when they themselves might have been involved in a car accident - “You step out, your heart’s racing”.
One thing should be made clear, she said: Her client “never intended to kill Mr Tasi”. Jurors should also consider what was going through her client’s mind at the time, she said.
Her co-counsel, Oscar Hintze, later suggested through cross-examination of some of the witnesses that the crash might have been unintentional and that Tasi might have been “punching back” with something in his hands during the confrontation that followed. However, no witness who testified today could testify to what was happening inside the car at the time.
Ian Tucker, representing the younger defendant, also kept his opening remarks short, as is required for the defence at the start of a trial.
“The trial ... will involve some distasteful and upsetting material,” he predicted. But his client, he added, is “entitled to a calm and dispassionate assessment of the evidence”.
The trial continues tomorrow before Justice David Johnstone 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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