One person was seriously injured in the shooting in downtown Auckland's Fort St on April 27 last year. Photo / Katie Oliver
Just one month after he stomped on a stranger’s head in a violent street fight, Declan Vaikele returned to Auckland Central with a homemade gun.
That time, amid another street fight, he shot a stranger in the back.
Both incidents were outlined in court last week as Vaikele was sentenced to prison.
“He really is someone who has had no serious [criminal] history at all,” defence lawyer Sam Teppett said, explaining to Judge Kathryn Maxwell that his client seemed to go off the rails after the death of his mother.
But the rapidly escalating violence was disturbing despite any circumstances in the defendant’s personal life, the judge said, describing the first attack as a “nasty example of street violence” that could have potentially attracted a prison sentence on its own.
There is a need to denounce and deter both crimes, she said.
“People need to understand that this kind of behaviour is completely unacceptable.”
Court documents state Vaikeli was one of four people arrested just after 4am on a Saturday last March when the first incident took place.
Three people were walking up Mayoral Drive in the city centre when Vaikele and his co-defendants quickly stopped their BMW on the side of the road and rushed the trio.
CCTV recorded the following “sustained assault” on two of the victims.
After a co-defendant knocked the first victim to the ground, throwing punches and kicking him in the head, Vaikele jumped in and continued the pummeling, police said.
“The defendant Vaikeli sat on the victim ... and punched him in the head multiple times,” the agreed summary of facts states.
When the second victim approached, trying to intervene, another co-defendant came up from behind and knocked him to the ground with a coward punch, court documents state.
“The defendant Vaikeli proceeded to strike and then kick the victim ... in the head with his right foot,” court documents state, explaining that he then stomped on the victim’s head at least four times.
“He walked away briefly before coming back again. He then placed his right foot on the victim’s chest, pulled the victim’s hair with his right hand, slapping him once and then kicking him twice.”
The second victim was able to get up and stumble across the road, followed by two of Vaikeli’s friends, as the defendant returned his attention to the first victim. He also pulled that man up by his hair and slapped him before Vaikele and his mates fled the scene with the first victim’s shoes.
Police, however, caught up to them a short time later.
Both of the attacked men reported bruising and swelling, but there were no reports of major injuries. That wouldn’t be the case the next month, when the second confrontation sent a man to the hospital needing emergency surgery.
On the second occasion, Vaikele and three associates were on Fort St in Auckland Central just before 4am on a Sunday when one of his friends initiated a fight with several strangers with another coward punch.
The fight spilled into a nearby kebab shop before others joined in, throwing punches outside.
Vaikele, who was on bail for the previous incident, initially stood on the other side of the road, watching as one of the complainant’s friends tried to break up the fight.
“While this happened, Mr Vaikele pulled out a makeshift firearm known as an improvised pipe-gun containing shotgun ammunition from his backpack,” court documents state.
He approached the first victim and pointed the gun at him.
“Chill,” the victim told him, explaining he was friends with the security guards.
Vaikele then walked up to a second victim with the gun drawn and pointed it at his back. His homemade gun malfunctioned the first time he tried to fire it, but he put it back together and took aim again at the other man’s back.
The victim held his back in pain and tried to walk away before collapsing.
“Mr Vaikeli continued running around Fort St holding up the pipe-gun, waving and pointing it at people, threatening to shoot them,” court documents state.
“[He] repeatedly shouted ‘twenty-eights’ before walking away ...”
Gang affiliation was not discussed during the sentencing, but the Two Eight Brotherhood, also known as the 28s, is a relatively low-profile South Auckland gang.
Vaikele was initially charged with injuring with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for the head-stomping incident. The charge was later reduced to one that carries a five-year maximum.
But he faced up to 14 years’ imprisonment for the wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm charge involving the firearm.
Vaikele’s lawyer noted that the defendant’s family had watched his well-being deteriorate and his drug use increase after his mother’s death in 2021.
Vaikele said he was bingeing on alcohol, methamphetamine and cannabis at the time of the incidents.
“This isn’t a case where there’s been serious harm that’s been life-changing or lasting in any way,” Teppett said.
Prosecutors, however, said the victim has not engaged with the court process, so they don’t know what lasting impacts his injuries might have had.
Multiple shotgun pellets had to be removed from his body.
“It was a serious injury,” Crown prosecutor Kiani Bullivant told the judge. “In the scale of wounds, it was quite large.”
Judge Maxwell stated several times during the hearing that she was most worried by the makeshift nature of the gun.
“It appears you were quite familiar with its operation,” she said.
The judge ordered a starting point of seven years for the shooting, then added a year for the earlier head-stomping incident, noting that the stomp sentence could have been as high as three years on a standalone basis.
She settled on a final prison sentence of five years and one month after factoring discounts for Vaikele’s guilty pleas, remorse, rehabilitation efforts and some adversity in his childhood, as well as a one-month uplift for offending on bail.
The judge accepted that Vaikele probably didn’t set out that night to shoot that specific victim. But there was a level of premeditation nonetheless, she told the defendant.
There was no question that assembling a makeshift gun was a bad idea, and that concealing such a weapon in a backpack on a night out was even worse, she said. He did that, she said, “for reasons only known to you”.
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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