Dimetrius Pairama was found dead in a property in Mangere July 2018.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
A 16-year-old harbouring “bitter resentment” over a Facebook spat was acting as a “wingman” as she deliberately participated in the “barbaric” torture and forced hanging of her 17-year-old former friend, prosecutors have argued as her nearly month-long murder and kidnapping trial comes to a close.
But the defence countered today that she was a “vulnerable” and “over-trusting” person with the mental capacity of a 9-year-old, in over her head living on the streets and controlled that day by a domineering, “predatory” adult nearly twice her age.
Jurors in the High Court at Auckland are expected to begin deliberating tomorrow in the trial of the now-21-year-old, who continues to have name suppression. They have spent the past two days listening to closing addresses.
“You are not dealing here with a normal 16-year-old,” defence lawyer David Niven told jurors, arguing that his client’s presence during the hanging of Dimetrius “Precious” Pairama inside an abandoned Māngere state home five years ago did not equate to participation, aid or encouragement - the legal elements needed for a murder conviction.
The defendant is the last of three to go to trial over Pairama’s horrific July 2018 death. Prosecutors have said the victim was repeatedly punched and stomped on, forced to disrobe and tied naked to a chair with soiled underwear stuffed into her mouth, had her hair hacked off, was burned on sensitive areas of her body with a makeshift blowtorch, had household chemicals and baby formula poured on top of her, burning her eyes, and was ultimately forced to choose the method of her murder: hanging or stabbing.
Co-defendants Ashley Winter, then 27, and Kerry Te Amo, 24, were found guilty by a jury the following year but the current defendant did not join them at trial because she was being held as a special patient in the Mason Clinic psychiatric facility. She’s no longer deemed incompetent to stand trial.
A fourth person who was at the house, then 14, was never charged with murder - she was instead given immunity in exchange for her co-operation with police and testimony at both trials.
Crown prosecutor Claire Robertson described Pairama this week as a “happy and outgoing” teen who “appeared to be doing her best to find her way in this world”. Like the defendant, she had a learning disability, had been in and out of Oranga Tamariki care and would sometimes run away and live on the street.
The motive for her killing varied among the three defendants, prosecutors said. The 14-year-old witness said Winter was the instigator and the driving force - blaming Pairama, without any evidence, it seemed, for an attack she earlier suffered by gang members. While the current defendant’s alleged motive, involving perceived Facebook insults and possibly a boy they both liked, might seem “relatively trivial” to most people, that’s not how the defendant saw it, Robertson argued.
“They all wanted the same thing. They were all in agreement that Ms Pairama needed to be killed,” Robertson told jurors, describing the current defendant as “no mere bystander to Ms Winter’s deranged plan”.
“The three were all in this together, from the beginning to the end,” she said.
She cited as evidence the testimony from four witnesses as well as the defendant’s own admission she engaged in some of the torture prior to the killing. There was the 14-year-old who was inside the home who said the defendant was initially hesitant about the killing but was eventually “keen” after Winter talked her into it by mentioning the Facebook slight. Another 14-year-old witness said the defendant confessed to “murder” the same day Pairama died, while a third witness with name suppression told police the defendant spoke of wanting to kill Pairama a month before the hanging. Another former teen witness, Josiah Rolleston, testified that the defendant boldly bragged to him, “We killed the bitch”, even though they barely knew each other.
“She played very much a leading role in the act of torture,” Robertson added, suggesting that it makes no sense she would beat Pairama, burn her, cut her hair and help tie her to a chair but then turn into the victim’s advocate when it came to the next step. “She was, you might think, Ashley’s wingman.”
But the defence said the witness inside the house didn’t seem to fully understand what “keen” meant and wasn’t in the room when Pairama died, while the 14-year-old outside the house had memory issues even five years ago about who had said what. The witness who said the defendant talked of wanting to hurt Pairama weeks earlier was schizophrenic and had been drinking that night, Niven noted. And Rolleston initially told police that the defendant said, “We killed her” - a bland statement, Niven argued, compared to, “We killed the bitch”.
It makes no sense, he said, that his client would willingly serve as a “wingman” to Winter, who she had never met until the night before Pairama’s death. Meanwhile, he said, “there appeared to be some genuine affection, some genuine friendship” between his client and Pairama.
“This obviously affected her very deeply,” he said, pointing to testimony from social workers who interacted with the defendant after the incident. “She was scared, she was upset, she was crying, she wasn’t sleeping, she was having nightmares, she was seeing ghosts.
“She never expected things to go as far as it did.”
Niven argued the prosecution was relying on emotive, objective words such as heinous, degrading, gruesome and torture when “what actually happened is not as terrible as those words might suggest”.
While his client did assault Pirama, he described the attack as “mild to moderate”. Pairama was later found by the pathologist to have no broken bones, internal injuries or cuts. As for helping to cut Pairama’s hair, that “might be an act of humiliation but is not going to do any physical damage”, he pointed out.
He acknowledged the defendant ”appears to have mimicked what Ashley did” when Pairama was burned with a blowtorch made from a lighter and a spray can. But while it “sounds awful”, the pathologist saw no signs of serious burns, he said.
“While you might recoil from those descriptions ... the actual harm that was caused was minimal,” he argued. “None of that contributed in any way to Dimetrius’ death.
“There is a gulf between what happened earlier and what happened in the hall.”
There was no direct evidence of who did what in the hallway as Pairama was forced to hang herself, he said, suggesting that his client was not a direct participant. Even if she was present and observing, her inability to extract herself from the situation should be attributed to her disability rather than malice, he said.
He pointed repeatedly to testimony from neuropsychologist Valerie McGinn - the defence’s sole witness, who concluded after multiple tests that the defendant suffered from foetal alcohol spectrum (FASD) disorder and as a result functioned essentially as a 9-year-old.
When taking the disability into account and also considering Winter’s older age, her larger frame and her “bullying, domineering type of personality”, jurors should agree the defendant “was not a completely free agent to do as she chose” that morning, Niven said. He noted the neuropsychologist’s testimony that people with FASD can often navigate simple situations but tend to get overwhelmed in complex situations.
“What happened inside that house, things very quickly became very complex,” Niven said. “It’s clear that she is not going to cope with what’s about to be unleashed. She is basically ambushed [with the proposal to kill Pairama] and put in this very difficult situation.
“She wanted it to stop [but] she had limited abilities to do anything,” he added, describing his client as “subservient” to Winter.
But FASD is not a defence to murder, prosecutors argued, suggesting that the defendant was far from helpless and clearly knew right from wrong. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have lied to police about what happened, they said.
“How do you want to die?” was a “very literal” and simple statement - not at all complicated, Robertson said.
Jurors are expected to begin deliberating tomorrow after Justice Kiri Tahana sums up the case.
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.
The man then went on to kick a police officer while being walked to a patrol car.