In a surprise concession, a patched Head Hunters member admitted through his lawyer today that he was present when a teen methamphetamine dealer was shot in the head.
Murder defendant Zak Snaylam then immediately used a digger to bury Jayden Mamfredos in a three-metre-deep hole at a rural North Auckland property.
The hiding spot was so good that it took a nine-month police search and a somewhat lucky hunch to eventually find the 19-year-old Bloods associate’s body.
But his lawyer said there’s a huge difference between the panicked - albeit effective - concealment of a body and the “quite sinister, quite evil” planned execution that prosecutors allege.
“It makes more sense this was a drug deal gone wrong,” defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC told jurors in the High Court at Auckland as lawyers wrapped up closing addresses for the three-week trial.
Kameta, 28, is on trial beside then-Head Hunters prospect Matthew Snaylan, 22, and 28-year-old construction company boss Hassan Al Fadhli, an associate of the same gang.
Prosecutors allege the trio schemed to lure Mamfredos out to Al Fadhli’s Dairy Flat property on the night of April 21, 2023, under the guise of “ganking” a Black Power member.
Mamfredos had come into possession of 1kg of methamphetamine, worth an estimated $80-100,000. The profitable haul, paired with his youth and inexperience, made him a vulnerable target in the criminal underworld, Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock said during her address yesterday.
The plan, as Mamfredos believed it to be, was to meet the Black Power member under the guise of selling the 1kg of meth but then to rob the buyer of his cash and keep the drugs, his friends said during the trial.
But in reality, it was a double-cross by the Head Hunters associates to make a quick buck by stealing Mamfredos’ drug stash for themselves, the Crown alleged. He would have arrived at the property to find that no such Black Power member existed - instead finding only a pre-dug grave waiting for him, McClintock told jurors.
Lawyers for all three defendants, however, have argued that the Crown has the scenario fundamentally wrong - built from guesswork, they said, rather than hard evidence.
There really was a Black Power member and a plan to rob him, Mansfield suggested. His client elected not to give evidence during the trial and Mansfield didn’t share an elaborate theory of what happened next. But the lawyer noted that Mamfredos was known to carry a gun and he had methamphetamine in his system, which he said makes users “seriously unpredictable”.
“If that ganking went awry, then the risk of death was very high,” Mansfield said.
“Of course, that was wrong,” he added of Kameta’s decision to conceal the body after the teen was somehow killed. “But burying a body is quite different than being responsible for killing an individual.
“People panic and they do dumbass things. Burying Mr Mamfredos falls within that ... designation.”
A common theme among all of the defence lawyers was that there wasn’t any solid evidence about who shot Mamfredos and under what circumstances.
“You can’t guess or speculate,” urged lawyer Annabelle Ives, representing Snaylam. “Something happened. Something went wrong. But it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t premeditated.”
Snaylam, she suggested, was likely inside charging his phone when Mamfredos was killed.
It is agreed that Al Fadhli was in Auckland Central with his then-partner and her children when the killing happened. Prosecutors have charged him with murder because they allege he was part of the premeditated plan, having purposefully kept his family away so the execution could be carried out.
Al Fadhli was the only defendant to give evidence at trial, emphasising to jurors earlier this week that he knew nothing about the plan.
But prosecutors disagreed. The behaviour of all three defendants, especially in the days and months following the killing, suggested that they had been in on the plan together, McClintock said.
“Eyewitnesses to a planned killing such as this are inherently unlikely,” she said, agreeing that it was a circumstantial case. But it was an unusually strong circumstantial case, she suggested, thanks in part to a “silent witness” - the GPS tracking system on a vehicle that placed Kameta and Snaylam at the scene of the crime.
She suggested that the plan had been set in motion 10 days before the killing, when the trio met at a Head Hunters gang pad. Snaylam then contacted Mamfredos, an old school friend, while still hanging out with his later co-defendants.
Phone data shows the trio met again at about 12.30am on the day Mamfredos was killed. Kameta then returned to the property at 5.09pm, just minutes after Al Fadhli left with his family. He stayed there for 26 minutes, and that’s when he must have pre-dug the grave, prosecutors suggested.
Kameta and Snaylam picked up Mamfredos at Auckland’s Birdwood Park and all three turned off their phones, but the vehicle GPS showed them continuing on to the Dairy Flat property. It appears Mamfredos was shot within the first seven minutes of the vehicle arriving at the property, McClintock speculated.
The vehicle then drove further down the driveway - so that Snaylam, the Crown suggested, could serve as a lookout as Kameta filled the pre-dug grave.
“There’s nothing to suggest there’s a mad panic ... and this vehicle fleeing the scene because something’s gone wrong, something unexpected,” McClintock said. “If something went wrong, why is Jayden dead with a single bullet in his head and it seems everyone else is unscathed?”
In the days that followed, she noted, Snaylam went about deleting his social media accounts he used to communicate with Mamfredos and removed the co-defendants from his contacts.
Kameta, meanwhile, bought a Harley-Davidson motorbike off TradeMe for $26,000 cash.
When police showed up at Al Fadhli’s home with a search warrant 40 days later, it caused “a high degree of panic”, McClintock said. Al Fadhli called Kameta to tip him off, pretending to make a work call, the prosecutor said. Kameta, in turn, went on the run, while Snaylam drove past the property about five times.
In an intercepted phone conversation with another Head Hunters member several days later, Kameta explained he was in hiding because of “missing persons accusations”.
“They think we over’d him,” he explained in the call, which was played twice for jurors.
The friend, who was calling from jail, said he would look after Snaylam - “the little prospect” - if he was to be held in custody too.
“So you’re going to be coming in too?” the friend asked.
“Yeah, probably,” Kameta replied.
Kameta explained that Al Fadhli’s home had just been raided.
“Reckon yous will be safe?” the friend asked again.
“F***, I don’t know,” Kameta responded. “Slim chance but I’m running with it, all good.”
Mansfield and the other defence lawyers argued that “no one in their right mind” would plan a murder over $80-$100,000 worth of drugs that would then have to be split three ways. That’s especially so, Mansfield said, when considering Kameta had his own steady drug-dealing income and a missing person investigation would have been sure to bring heat down on it.
But McClintock took a darker view of what the defendants were capable of, suggesting that the lure of an “easy target” would have been too strong.
“Sadly, what you can see is for these men Jayden Mamfredos was dispensable,” she said. “His life was cheap and meth was king for them.
“...They didn’t think they’d be caught because this was extremely well planned and thought out.”
Jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Monday morning, after Justice Geoffrey Venning sums up the case for them.
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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