Toni-Ashley Crawford appears in the High Court at Auckland, accused of having murdered Teri Rhind in Pukekohe in October 2024. Photo / Michael Craig
Less than two hours after she hit a stranger with her car on a residential South Auckland street - leaving the pedestrian fatally injured on the side of the road - Toni-Ashley Crawford appeared to be concentrating on a potential hook-up.
“Can we huggle?” she texted with a smiley face emoji at 3.24am as she drove towards the love interest’s Pukekohe home, her windscreen smashed and a noticeable dent in her bonnet.
But fury seemed not too far from the surface when the man blew her off, falsely claiming to have moved to Australia.
“What the f***,” she wrote after trying to call him multiple times. “I nearly f***ing died coming to see you.
“I’m starting to feel violence. I’m hoping to break into these houses and assault these f***ing strangers if u don’t stop being an egg to me.”
It’s that same quickness to anger that might have prompted the 33-year-old to steer her speeding car towards pedestrian Teri Erueti Rhind earlier that morning, prosecutors suggested yesterday as Crawford’s murder trial began in the High Court at Auckland.
Rhind, 37, died at Middlemore Hospital in October 2024, several days after he was found badly injured along Pukekohe’s Wellington Street. He had laid in the road unnoticed by anyone else for about 45 minutes, suffering substantial road rash, an indentation on his chest from broken ribs and a damaged vertebral artery that would eventually cut off blood flow and oxygen to his brain.
The impact, caught on grainy black and white footage from a neighbour’s security camera, was played for jurors for the first time as Crown prosecutors Aysser Al-Janabi and Sylvie Arnerich gave an opening address.
It showed, they said, the defendant initially driving past Rhind on an otherwise “unremarkable street” at almost exactly 2am before U-turning and driving over the speed limit at the stranger on the wrong side of the road.
Upon contact, Rhind flew up into the air before crashing to the concrete, Al-Janabi told jurors.
“Ms Crawford did not stop,” she added. “She accelerated away, and she drove away from the scene.”
Rhind, who was suffering a mental health episode that morning, had been witnessed by others before the crash shouting as he went for a walk. While the defendant’s precise motive is unknown, perhaps Crawford’s blood began to boil when the pedestrian shouted something as she drove by, prosecutors speculated.
Defence lawyers Ethan Butler and Kelly-Ann Stoikoff acknowledged their client was driving the vehicle as it fatally hit Rhind. But that doesn’t equate to murder, they said, noting that it was dark and there were cars lining both sides of the street.
“This was an unfortunate, tragic accident when Mr Rhind came out of nowhere, wandering all over the road during one of his episodes,” Butler said during his opening statement, urging jurors not to make a snap judgment based on their first viewing of the CCTV footage.
“The more you watch that clip, the more you will agree it was an accident and Toni Crawford is not guilty of murder.”
Under court rules, the defence opening statement was much shorter than the Crown’s address, but the defence will get another chance to address jurors after prosecutors finish calling evidence.
Prosecutors also suggested to jurors that a decision won’t be made solely on the CCTV. Crawford’s behaviour in the hours and days after the crash are also telling, Al-Janabi said.
“My sexy love stop it please,” she wrote while still parked in the neighbourhood of the man who claimed to be in Australia. “I’m in trouble, okay.
“I actually just wanted to come see you. I have mind works issues. I really need your help, okay?”
Later that morning, still before sunrise, she went to another friend’s house and claimed to have hit a tree. But she was “antsy” and evasive when asked about her damaged car, at one point mentioning something about needing bleach for fingerprints, the witness is expected to say.
Another person showed up and was similarly intrigued, prosecutors said.
“I looks like you hit someone. Where’s the body?” the man joked, to which the defendant and her other friend both replied: “We’ve left them for the rats.”
Her other explanations for the night were that the car had been stolen and she woke up in the passenger seat, prosecutors said.
Police attention was directed at Crawford three days after the crash, after a friend had removed her windscreen at her request and had left the glass rolled up in his autobody shop.
The witness who had made the offhand “where’s the body” remark on the morning of the crash had since learned more about there having been a high-profile fatal crash in the area that at that point was unsolved.
He asked if he could have the windscreen. His partner then took it to the Pukekohe Police Station, jurors were told. The registration sticker was still on the windscreen when it was handed over, as was Rhind’s blood.
When police located her, Crawford said she had smoked methamphetamine two days earlier and was coming down, prosecutors said.
She then agreed to a lengthy police interview weeks later that prosecutors described as nonsensical and hard to follow at times. In it, she continued to insist that she hit a tree, Al-Janabi told jurors.
Taken all together, Al-Janabi added, Crawford’s actions amounted to “the conduct of somebody who was untroubled by what they’d just done”.
The trial, before Justice Layne Harvey, is set to resume this morning.
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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