A young couple are on trial for manslaughter, accused of having held on to 18-year-old pedestrian Connor Boyd's arm as they drove off from a nightclub in Central Auckland in 2022. Photo / Dean Purcell
A young couple are on trial for manslaughter, accused of having held on to 18-year-old pedestrian Connor Boyd's arm as they drove off from a nightclub in Central Auckland in 2022. Photo / Dean Purcell
Sobs rang out in an otherwise silent courtroom today as jurors and those in the crowded gallery watched for the first time graphic CCTV footage showing the final conscious moments of 18-year-old Connor Boyd’s life.
A young couple with name suppression are on trial for manslaughter in the High Courtat Auckland, accused of grabbing Boyd’s arm as they drove away in an SUV from a Central Auckland nightclub on the morning of April 24, 2022.
Boyd, who was a pedestrian, was seen on camera running beside the vehicle before tumbling away, his limp body coming to a rest near the intersection of Customs St East and Commerce St around 2.35am. Prosecutors have said the SUV ran over his head as he was flung from the vehicle, causing unsurvivable injuries.
Several people walked briskly out of the courtroom gallery immediately after the footage was shown, and the female defendant cried quietly in the dock.
The footage was played during the testimony of Brooklyn Beetham, a passenger inside the SUV who was a friend of the couple on trial.
“I just heard [the female defendant] scream, ‘He won’t let go! He won’t let go!’” Beetham said, explaining that she didn’t know if the female defendant was referring to Boyd or to the male defendant.
“I hear this massive noise and then I turn back and see Connor’s body,” she said of the incident. “It was just a loud noise as if someone’s being run over. We just kept driving.”
The witness said she told the female defendant to call 111, and she did. They met police at the couple’s Ponsonby flat a short time later, she said.
Defence lawyers have described his death as a “tragic accident” unworthy of a criminal charge. They’ve suggested that Boyd wasn’t being dragged when he fell, but was voluntarily running beside the SUV and jumping on its runner board in an effort the throw punches through the open window.
The CCTV footage was filmed from too far away to confirm or debunk the suggestion.
Jurors also heard today from another teen who was seen on CCTV being attacked by the female defendant inside the nightclub. It was the second time she had been attacked by the female defendant in the same bar in less than a week.
“I felt a yank, like a grab, on the back of my head,” victim Ella Olson told jurors, explaining that she didn’t see the defendant when she was pulled to the ground by her hair, bruising her tailbone. “I felt like I couldn’t move ... and once I looked up straight, I could see it was her.
“Her leg was stomping me around my stomach and my chest area.”
In addition to the manslaughter charge involving Boyd, the female defendant also faces a series of assault charges relating to her interactions with Olson that night. She has pleaded guilty to pulling Olson backwards by the hair but denies having stomped on her during the same attack. She also denies having kicked Olson in the face a short time later as Olson was crying on the phone to her mother, sitting on a kerb outside the club and waiting for a ride home.
The defendants, who were both 18 at the time, have also pleaded guilty to attacking Boyd that night in an incident outside the nightclub before his death. CCTV footage of that interaction showed Boyd getting pushed into a large planter and kicked before walking away - not showing any visible aggression of his own.
Prosecutor Claire Paterson told jurors at the outset of the trial yesterday that Boyd’s death was the result of “pointless teen drama” and “immature teen relationships” that had become a “festering sore point” for the female defendant, causing her to act aggressively.
Olson had been in a brief relationship with a mutual friend who had recently ended a long-term relationship with another woman. The defendant, who was friends with the ex-girlfriend, had begun harassing Olson over the phone to the point where Olson blocked her number.
Connor Boyd died outside Saturdays nightclub in Britomart, Central Auckland.
It came to a head on a Wednesday night inside popular Britomart nightclub Saturdays, when Olson and both defendants showed up separately.
Seeing Olson, the female defendant called her a “whore” and a “homewrecker” before pouring a drink over Olson’s head, then grabbing Olson’s drink and throwing it at her, Olson recalled today. The two exchanged punches and were escorted out of the club, CCTV footage shows.
Olson said she thought the “beef” was over because the defendant had got it out of her system. But then she ran into the defendant at the same nightclub several days later, just past midnight on Sunday, April 24 last year.
After noticing the defendant, Olson said she was trying to avoid her when her hair was pulled from behind.
Although the hair pull was clearly seen on CCTV, the crowd was so thick that jurors couldn’t see what happened once Olson fell to the ground. Defence lawyer Julie-Anne Kincade suggested repeatedly that the stomps never occurred and that her client instead bent over to pick up her dropped phone.
Olson insisted she remembered the attack correctly and that it involved stomping.
She conceded, however, that the second attack that night involved a kick to her cheek that “wasn’t super-forceful, so it didn’t hurt as badly”. Kincade suggested the kick didn’t occur at all.
Sometime after the second attack that night, while still waiting for her mother, Olson said she ran into Boyd, a mutual friend of hers and the defendants.
“He saw I was upset and asked what happened,” she recalled. “I told him that [the female defendant] had hit me and I was going home. I asked if he would wait with me.
“He was just comforting me and telling me that everything would be okay.”
At some point while the two were standing together, the male defendant walked up. Although she wasn’t listening to all that was said, she recalled Boyd and the male defendant exchanging words “like they were having a disagreement ... but not a full-blown argument”. Boyd, she said, was a calm person by nature and didn’t seem especially riled by it.
A short time later, her mother, Sasha Olson, arrived and the witness and several of her friends got in the car.
Sasha Olson, testifying next, recalled receiving a call that night from her daughter “crying hysterically”.
As they were talking, the SUV with the defendants pulled up across the street and stopped, she said.
“I was quite angry. I had a lot of adrenaline coursing through me,” the mother said. “I’m not proud, but I remember calling out the window, ‘You f***ing little bitch, we’re definitely going to the police this time’.”
Connor Boyd, 18, died in April 2022 after he was run over in Central Auckland. Two other teens have been charged with manslaughter.
She offered Boyd a ride, but he declined, and she didn’t have any worries about his safety.
CCTV shows he was walking towards the SUV as Olson drove off.
Sasha Olson recalled looking back for him and realising she could no longer see him.
“‘Oh my God, that’s so strange. What the hell?’” she recalled thinking.
It was around that time, prosecutors allege, that the defendants grabbed Boyd’s arm and drove off.
Lawyer Paul Borich KC, acting on behalf of the male defendant, has suggested his client was acting in self-defence when he drove off - wanting to protect his passengers from getting attacked.
During cross-examination of the mother today, Borich pointed repeatedly to her recollection that the SUV had either slowed down or stopped completely at a traffic light. Boyd had ample opportunity to stop throwing punches and leave the vehicle at that point, he has suggested.
Borich also noted that, in the mother’s initial statement to police, Boyd had responded when the mother paid him a compliment: “Ella, I’ve always got your back, you know that. I would fight five guys for you.”
The trial is set to continue tomorrow before Justice Ian Gault 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.
