Talafu Petelo, who was also known by the first names Siose and Siaosi, had immigrated to New Zealand from Samoa in 2019. He had been raised in Samoa by his mother but that evening he was drinking with his father, who lived in Papatoetoe.
Esera, meanwhile, was a furniture warehouse employee who was finishing up a 12-hour workday and was planning to cut loose with some co-workers at the Oakwood Manor motel in Māngere when the men’s paths would cross.
Upon arriving at the motel, Esera encountered a tense situation involving the teen’s stepmother, who had been already visiting the same unit where Esera intended to socialise, authorities allege.
“While drinking, [Talafu Petelo’s stepmother] became agitated and became aggressive to some people in the neighbouring unit,” prosecutors said today. “She swore at Esera and also possibly called him a ‘pussy’.”
She then called her husband to the motel, and Talafu Petelo also arrived. A fight broke out at the neighbour’s unit and police were called. While Esera was not involved in the fight, at some point one of the participants shouted, “Get a knife. I want to kill,” while motioning in the defendant’s direction, prosecutors said.
Already insulted by the stepmother earlier, Esera became enranged and decided he was going to teach the group a lesson, Kefu said. He drove off but would return an hour later with the rifle, the prosecutor said.
When police arrived, they ended up pepper spraying Talafu Petelo’s father but ultimately decided not to arrest anyone. Talafu Petelo left the scene without his father but was later sent back with his uncle to look for him. CCTV from the motel indicates both parties returned just three minutes apart from each other.
This time, prosecutors said, Esera was in the passenger seat of his ute as co-defendant Faataape drove. The two waited in the vehicle until Talafu Petelo’s Suzuki left, then they followed on Massey Rd, Kefu said.
All of the passengers in the teen’s car said they saw a firearm being pointed at them as they drove, and they all recalled hearing shots from behind the vehicle a short time later.
“They immediately react by ducking,” Kefu told jurors as he described two bullets in the back windscreen, one in the boot and another hitting a driver’s side panel between the front and back seats. Talafu Petelo, he said, “was all of the sudden slumped over the driving wheel, and there’s blood coming out of the back of his head”.
He was rushed to nearby Middlemore Hospital in the same vehicle he was driving but pronounced dead a short time later.
Esera turned himself in two days later.
“He said he was just trying to scare them,” Kefu told jurors today. “You would’ve thought that [pointing the gun at them, causing them to duck] was enough ... But he didn’t end there. He had more sinister intentions.
“However unimpressed, slighted or angry he might have been in relation to the melee ... it did not justify Mr Esera going all the way to his home, getting a powerful weapon, following these people and firing at them.”
Esera’s lawyers declined to address the jury today but will have another opportunity to do so after the Crown finishes presenting evidence. Faataape’s lawyer, Amy Jordan, gave a brief statement urging jurors not to lump the two defendants together.
“He had no idea or knowledge that a shooting was going to take place,” she said of her client. “He had no idea of what Mr Esera was thinking.”
The first witnesses are set to begin testifying tomorrow as the trial continues before Justice Layne Harvey.
