Māngere homicide: Tupufia Faulau sentenced for murder of 69-year-old Lealofi Paniani

Murder suspect Tupufia Faulau appears via an audio-visual link at an earlier hearing. Photo / NZME

A recent parolee who used a machete to fatally attack a disabled 69-year-old grandfather of 24 who had given him a place to stay - inflicting at least 35 blows, most of which were to the victim’s face and head - has been ordered to return to prison for at least 15 years.

Tupufia Fualau, 59, had been out of prison for just three weeks for another brutal attack when he turned his aggression in October 2021 on Lealofi Paniani as a night of drinking took a dark turn in Paniani’s Māngere East home.

“Mr Paniani was aware you were subject to parole conditions that required you to be at an approved address and refrain from drinking alcohol,” Justice Graham Lang noted during today’s sentencing hearing in the High Court at Auckland. “Mr Paniani told you repeatedly he was going to tell your probation officer you should be removed from the address.”

Knowing the 69-year-old kept a machete behind his fridge, the defendant went into the kitchen and retrieved it before returning to the living room to begin the attack. In addition to the wounds to his head, Paniani suffered multiple defensive blows to his arms and hands.

The defendant went to a neighbour’s house and told them to call police because there had been a death. Emergency responders found Paniani alive, but he died at Middlemore Hospital a short time later.

During one of three emotional victim impact statements read aloud in court today, one of Paniani’s daughters recalled the trauma of seeing his lifeless body in the hospital bed that night.

“Dad had cuts all over his head, his face, up and down his arms,” she recalled. “I couldn’t stop crying. All I wanted was my dad back.”

She whispered into his ear that his newest grandchild had just recently been born.

“Sometimes breathing hurts because I relive the last moments my dad lived on this earth,” she said. “My father wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t deserve this.”

Paniani’s family also recounted how the victim had suffered a spinal injury in a 2016 crash that left him with mobility issues. Despite the setbacks in life, he still pushed forward and even went out of his way to help others who were in need like the defendant, they said.

“He was strong and resilient. Everyone respected and looked up to him,” one of Paniani’s granddaughters told the court through tears, recounting how she spend weekends and school holidays with him growing up.

“My happy and safe place turned into hell because of you,” she told the defendant. “I hope you get what you deserve, because my Papa didn’t deserve what you did to him.”

Fualau, who wore a T-shirt and wore his grey, thinning hair in a long braided ponytail, spent much of the hearing looking down into his lap as he listened to a Samoan interpreter sitting by his side.

Fualau grew up in Samoa as the son of a village chief but was expelled from school at 17. After five years of working at his family’s plantation, he was sent to New Zealand with the hope the change in scenery could help him turn over a new leaf, according to a report prepared for the sentencing hearing.

Unfortunately, his pattern of drinking and violence continued, Lang said.

In 2018, Fualau was sentenced in Manukau District Court for wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm after attacking his partner with a piece of lumber because she kept waking him up to talk. That attack continued even after the 4x2 broke over the woman’s head.

The defendant was released three years later on September 30, 2021, just three weeks before he murdered Paniani.

Murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison. Lang today said his role was to decide how much time Fualau should be made to serve before he is eligible to apply for parole.

Crown prosecutor Chris Howard noted that it was a callus and brutal attack, while defence lawyer Michael Kan pointed out that both men had been drinking that night.

“He has a drinking problem,” Kan acknowledged of his client. “When he drinks ... when someone else is around him violence may result from this alcohol.”

But most violence involving drinking doesn’t involve lying in wait with a machete, the judge pointed out.

“You said he kept on swearing at you and saying words you were not happy with,” Lang later noted to the defendant. “You said you beat him up because you couldn’t take it.”

While there was a small degree of provocation, the defendant’s extreme response was “wholly out of proportion to [Paniani’s] conduct”, he said, noting that the victim suffered multiple skull fractures, broken teeth and dentures.

He ordered a 15-year minimum period of imprisonment, taking into account an 18-month discount for his guilty plea that saved the victim’s family the trauma of re-living the murder through a trial.