In the days immediately after 19-year-old Jayden Mamfredos vanished – as police were just starting to launch their missing persons case – a mother’s intuition seemed to draw Maria Mamfredos to her son’s old schoolmate.
Matthew Snaylam assured the anxious mum he would do everything he could to aid the search.
But eight months later, after Jayden Mamfredos was found buried at a rural North Auckland property, police accused Snaylam and two other Head Hunters-affiliated co-defendants of “double-crossing” the victim – luring him to a premeditated, mafia-like “execution” to steal a valuable haul of methamphetamine.
The murder trial for Snaylam, Zak Kameta and Hassan Al Fadhli began yesterday in the High Court at Auckland. All three have pleaded not guilty.
“Have you got ahold of jaydax yet??” Snaylam asked during his first interaction with the mum, as she reached out to him via Instagram on the Monday after her son’s disappearance. “I’ve been trying since Friday.”
Snaylam acknowledged he was with Mamfredos in West Auckland on April 21, 2023, the last day he was seen alive. But he insisted they went their separate ways early that evening, hours before he vanished.
“I’ve tried ringing the hospital n the bro said he checked the cells so idk where he’s gone or what’s he doing,” Snaylam wrote.
The mother was tenacious, however, quizzing him repeatedly over the course of weeks about her son’s interactions with him that day.
“Any update, anything, anytime ive been awke for 2 days now so ... please just let me know,” she wrote, adding later that day: “Everyone thought he had gone with you – cause thats what he told the boys.”
Snaylam said they did have plans for the evening that Jayden Mamfredos disappeared, but those plans had fallen through.
“Like I said anything I can do to help I’m happy to do so,” he wrote, adding about an hour later: “Yeah I can’t lie at this point I’m getting worried he slangs the stuff and he smokes it.”
The mother told jurors today she took that message to mean her son was using and selling meth – something she said she had no knowledge of at the time.
Methamphetamine, however, would become a major part of the police investigation as it transitioned from a missing persons case to a suspected homicide.
During her opening address yesterday, Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock described Mamfredos as an ambitious young drug dealer who was in over his head and unknowingly became a target after he obtained a haul of methamphetamine worth an estimated six figures.
The Crown theory is that Snaylam, a Head Hunters prospect who was also starting to make his way in the criminal underworld, pitched a plan to Jayden Mamfredos in which they would pretend to sell 1kg of meth to a Black Power member, but with an actual intent to rob him of the cash and keep the drugs.
In reality, the Crown has suggested, there never was a Black Power buyer lined up. It was alleged that Snaylam and Kameta, the patched Head Hunter who was sponsoring him for the gang, planned all along to rob and kill Mamfredos once they got him to the Dairy Flat home of construction boss Al Fadhli – where a 3m-deep grave had already been prepared with a digger.
After the killing, each defendant had a separate role, prosecutors have alleged. One of Snaylam’s jobs, they said, was to placate the victim’s mother.
Jurors heard more about the Black Power robbery plan today from another friend of Jayden Mamfredos, who had chatted with him at a West Harbour barbershop on the afternoon before his disappearance.
Police have asked that the witness, who quietly mumbled answers from the witness box, not be named.
Mamfredos reportedly told the friend that he, Snaylam and a person known as “Johnny Trigger” planned to go “somewhere up north” for the meth-sale-turned-robbery. The friend said he didn’t know who Johnny Trigger was, but the Crown has alleged Kameta was the third member of the trio.
“He [Mamfredos] said that he’d been to this location,” the friend testified. “They dug a hole for this [Black Power] person.”
He elaborated in a police statement: “I knew why they dug it without them telling me why, so I didn’t question it.”
Mamfredos was expecting to get “something like $100,000″ from the robbery, the friend said.
The friend described Manfredos to police as someone who was in a street gang and had carried a gun – often concealed inside a Gucci bag – ever since he started “moving stuff”.
“I believe that Matt and Johnny Trigger had something to do with Jayden’s disappearance,” the friend said bluntly in another statement to police.
During cross-examination of the witness today, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, representing Kameta, suggested there might have actually been a drug deal with a Black Power member that went south.
But any boasts by Mamfredos about digging a hole in advance would have been one of his many exaggerations not to be taken seriously, the lawyer contended.
“It would be a pretty dangerous thing to do, wouldn’t it?” he asked the witness of the robbery scenario. “Because if you get caught ganking a Black Power member, you could be injured or worse?”
The witness agreed.
The trial, expected to last five weeks, is set to resume tomorrow before Justice Geoffrey Venning 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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