A teen who boasted of putting his enemies in “body baggies” hours after a fatal mistaken-identity shooting has failed to convince a jury he never meant to kill.
Chaelim John McCarthy, now 20, had admitted to manslaughter at the start of his High Court at Auckland trial four weeks ago but insisted he had been unfairly accused of murder.
Jurors deliberated for four days before finding him guilty of the more serious of the two charges yesterday afternoon.
Justice Laura O’Gorman will sentence McCarthy in November. However, he won’t be joined by a co-defendant with continuing name suppression who was acquitted by the same jury of unlawfully possessing the same gun and being an accessory to murder after the fact.
In a lengthy closing address last week, Crown prosecutor Chris Howard argued McCarthy’s own words made it inconceivable the shotgun blast in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2024 had been a tragic but unintentional misfire.
“This shooting was not some random accident in response to a random event,” he said, describing it instead as the culmination of a long-running feud with another group of young men dubbed the Kelston or “Kelly” boys. “In his mind, this was retaliation.
“... Chaelim McCarthy was primed and ready to go off.”
At about 3.14am, McCarthy had fired a single shot into a green Lexus outside a boozy New Year’s Eve party in Manurewa. The blast, which appears to have travelled through a roughly 9cm gap in the tinted and partially rolled-down window, resulted in a fatal head wound for front-seat passenger Jaymis Faletolu.
The car’s 17-year-old driver lost an eye as a result of the same blast but survived. He was not called to give evidence during the trial because he has no memory of that morning, prosecutors said.
McCarthy didn’t realise it at the time, but both victims were his mates.
He thought the car belonged to two people who had just violently raided the New Year’s Eve party, throwing punches at random people and causing confused panic before running off shouting Head Hunters gang slogans, lawyers said.
Regardless of whom he thought was in the car, McCarthy never intended for the shot to hurt anybody, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC argued, accusing the Crown of taking “a rather sinister view of every aspect of what happened here”.
To be found guilty of murder, each juror had to agree McCarthy either directly intended to kill or that he knew death was a likely result when he pulled the trigger and he recklessly ran that risk anyway.
But McCarthy only intended to shoot at the engine of the car, thinking it was about to u-turn and drive towards him with a group of Head Hunters inside, Mansfield argued.
The horrible aim, he suggested, would have been because the defendant was highly intoxicated after having abstained from alcohol for months and because he was shaken by the unprovoked attack that had just occurred inside the party.
“None of that was contemplated,” Mansfield said, explaining that McCarthy was bleeding from his earring having been yanked out and from having just lost two teeth in the melee. “None of that was wanted.”
He fired the shotgun within 10 seconds of picking it up, without time to think, Mansfield said, adding that there’s no evidence he had ever shot that or any other weapon before.
“I’m not suggesting that Mr McCarthy was perfect,” Mansfield said. “I’m just suggesting he’s not a deliberate killer like the Crown suggests.
“... Intoxicated, young, in shock and in pain, this boy makes the mistake of his life ... It was a situation of chaos and panic.”
But firing a shotgun at close range into the window of an occupied car is an “obvious and unreasonable risk”, Howard argued, pointing out that the trajectory of the blast was not even remotely close to the car’s engine block.
Prosecutors emphasised the defendants’ own texts well in advance of the shooting and immediately afterwards. McCarthy and the co-defendant had discussed getting a gun as early as July 2023.
On December 11, the two defendants discussed picking up a gun to use for “intimidation”. McCarthy posed for photos with the gun the next day.
On Christmas Eve, the pair discussed the co-defendant’s ex-girlfriend, whose New Year’s Eve party they would end up going to. The co-defendant told McCarthy then that the ex had gone out with a “Kelly dude”, so both would have known a confrontation was likely if they attended the party, the Crown suggested.
On Boxing Day, they discussed how someone they knew had “stabbed up” some members of the Kelston group, taking their phones and shoes.
“So what, still keen for the New Year’s party as well?” the co-defendant asked.
McCarthy responded: “All day. It’s war.”
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, McCarthy told another associate about how he wanted to “drink the new year” after “shutting Kelston down”. That same day, he took another photo with the gun, wearing a balaclava.
Prosecutors repeatedly showed CCTV footage from a neighbouring house showing a flash at 3.14am on New Year’s – the moment, they suggested, that McCarthy opened fire after retrieving the gun from his car and yelling at the Lexus.
The pair then waited around for three minutes before leaving the scene.
Just after 7.30 that same morning, McCarthy began a text exchange with a friend in which he said: “Just killed three [racial slur].”
His friend asked him if he was telling the truth.
“Bible,” he responded. “Body baggies.”
He added: “I’d do it again, uso. They chose the gangster life. They wanna be gangster. We showed them that life.”
The co-defendant took a screenshot of a Herald article about the shooting at 7.47am. Minutes later, they were seen on a video giggling, throwing pillows and play-fighting as McCarthy again wore a balaclava.
Police arrested McCarthy on January 17, finding the gun still in his car but chopped into three pieces.
“This is war,” Howard repeated to the jury.
“At first glance it looks like the shooting may have been some instinctive response. But there really is a build-up to it.”
McCarthy’s lawyer acknowledged the pair were “acting like idiots” in the giggling video hours after the shooting, but he suggested it was because they weren’t yet sober and hadn’t fully come to grips with what happened.
Drunken teen exaggeration and bravado, likewise, could explain McCarthy’s incorrect text about having just killed three people, Mansfield added.
He urged jurors not to be prejudiced by his client’s references to gangster lifestyle and guns.
“No everyone in our community is born in a leafy suburb where when they wake up they hear the birds singing,” he said, suggesting that it wasn’t at all unusual for young people in South Auckland to be “strapped” with a gun for protection.
He asked jurors to “keep a grip on reality” and consider the “way young people talk”.
While McCarthy and his friends may have posed with guns, Mansfield dismissed it as a fashion choice in a misguided attempt to look cool.
“They’re looking like black American rap stars,” he said, adding that a youthful intrigue with hip-hop culture doesn’t make them killers.
More telling, Mansfield argued, was the fact McCarthy had never been in trouble previously. He was working full-time for his father and training with his boxing club in all of his spare time.
“He wasn’t a little gangster,” Mansfield said.
Murder and manslaughter both carry maximum life sentences, but sentencing outcomes for the two are generally quite different.
Unless a judge finds it to be manifestly unjust, murder typically carries a mandatory life sentence with a minimum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years. ‘
Youth, however, has been frequently cited in decisions finding such a sentence unjust.
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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