Teen who stabbed Epapara Poutapu at Albany bus station found guilty of manslaugher instead of murder

• A jury convicted a 17-year-old of manslaughter – not murder – for fatally stabbing 24-year-old Epapara Poutapu in Albany.
• The teen claimed self-defence, which if accepted would have resulted in an acquittal.
• The defendant will keep name suppression at least until sentencing, scheduled for next month.

A 16-year-old who slashed the face of a 24-year-old schizophrenic stranger and fatally plunged a knife into his neck during a confrontation at a busy Albany bus station was not justified in using lethal force, a jury has decided.

But after roughly 16 hours of deliberations that stretched over three days – including several notes stating that they were deadlocked – the group settled on a conviction for manslaughter instead of murder this afternoon.

The defendant, now 17 and with ongoing name suppression, admitted to the stabbing while in the witness box last week but claimed self-defence – not even realising, he said, that he had the knife in his hand as he lashed out without time to think about the consequences.

“It just happened,” he testified over and over again.

The teen, standing between two youth workers in a High Court at Auckland dock, betrayed no visible emotion as the jury foreman read aloud the unanimous decision to a courtroom that remained packed despite there having been no substantive developments in the case since Justice Graham Lang’s summing up late Monday afternoon.

Supporters of both the defendant and the victim, however, shed silent tears.

Epapara Poutapu bled to death on the afternoon of September 18, 2023, after the kitchen paring knife wielded by the teen defendant severed two major arteries in his neck as they faced off at the North Shore transit hub. The weapon had been used with such force that the tip of the blade broke off and lodged in Poutapu’s vertebrae, resulting in a bloody scene that left commuters shocked and traumatised.

The teen ran from the station immediately after the fatal blow was inflicted and borrowed another stranger’s phone to call his mother, who took him home. Along the way, he threw the knife out of the car window into Lake Pupuke.

As the defence wrapped up its case on Monday, jurors learned that a man matching Poutapu’s description had been acting intimidatingly to two other teen boys at the bus stop eight days earlier – leaving them alone only after an older woman intervened and told him off. Jurors had already been told of Poutapu’s mental health problems, and that he might have been off his schizophrenia medication, experiencing auditory hallucinations and muttering to himself.

They were not, however, told that he was a 501 deportee from Australia. Being forced to leave Australia, where he lived since the age of 1, was unfair and had left him off-balance and without family support, his father previously told Stuff.

Police investigate the fatal stabbing of Epapara Poutapu (inset) at the Albany bus station in September 2023. Photo / Dean Purcell

During her closing address on Monday, defence lawyer Barbara Hunt described her client as a “happy 16-year-old on his way to pick up cigarettes and food with his friends” on the day of the incident when he was confronted by an “irrational, angry and out-of-control” stranger. The youth had no interest in fighting a man eight years his senior but didn’t feel he had a choice after Poutapu advanced on him, Hunt argued.

“He’s responding only to what came at him,” she said, describing the defendant as having thrown a blind overhead punch with a knife in his hand after Poutapu tried to kick him in the head. “He was confronted by a threat he never anticipated.”

He had no intention of stabbing the man in the neck, she argued, adding that Poutapu’s own momentum due to the kick likely added to the lethality of the wound.

CCTV footage of the fight – shown to jurors repeatedly, at different speeds and from different angles, over just more than a week of evidence – showed that the two had exchanged words for about 33 seconds followed by six seconds of fighting. The defendant, Hunt said, didn’t have time to think of a way out of it so he just responded on instinct “without any idea of what he was doing”.

“Look at the anger in Mr Poutapu’s face,” Hunt said of the footage. “...This person’s got tattoos, missing teeth, he’s incoherent, aggressive.

“Just put yourself in [the teen’s] shoes over that six-second timeframe... There’s just simply no doubt [the teen] was protecting himself from an attack by a very unwell man. These are the actions of a frightened boy.”

But prosecutor Alysha McClintock invited jurors to apply a much different interpretation of the confrontation, describing the defendant as someone who was 11kg heavier than Poutapu and was looking to “bait” an unwell man into a fight that he knew would be unfair because he secretly had a knife.

“It was an episode of utterly senseless violence,” she said. “The essence of self-defence is that you have no choice ... but this case in reality had nothing to do with that. [The defendant] had many choices. He chose to resort to lethal violence. From the beginning, this defendant was in charge.

“...This was about retribution.”

McClintock noted that Poutapu had a short time earlier exchanged words with the defendant’s 18-year-old friend, Noah, who was smaller in stature. Poutapu then walked away, which is where the incident should have ended, she said.

But as the “muscle” of the group, the defendant took it upon himself to confront Poutapu again and escalate the situation, the prosecutor said.

The knife used to kill Epapara Poutapu, 24, at an Albany bus station in Sept 2023 was entered into evidence in the High Court at Auckland during the trial of a 17-year-old who inflicted the fatal blow. The teen, whose name is suppressed, said he was acting in self-defence. Photo / Craig Kapitan

“It was a choice ... to stir things up. It was a choice ... knowing wherever this goes, he’s got a knife in his pocket... Really, he wanted to show him who’s boss at his bus stop.”

In the defendant’s own recounting of what happened, he described himself as aspiring to be a peacemaker of sorts.

“I walked over to ask him if we were all good ... and what his problem was,” the teen testified, describing his exact words to Poutapu as: “Are we all day?”

Poutapu allegedly responded with nonsensical “jibber jabber” which made the teen think he might be “a crackhead”, he told jurors.

What was coherent, the teen said, was when Poutapu said, “What, you wanna go, bro?” then took off his jacket and put down his belongings.

“It’s all good. Calm down,” the defendant told jurors he responded.

Police investigate the fatal stabbing of Epapara Poutapu at the Albany bus station in September 2023. Photo / Dean Purcell

The CCTV footage, which has no sound, showed Poutapu squaring off into a fighting stance and the teen also hunched over and starting to bounce side-to-side. While Poutapu had his fists in front of him, the teen’s hand was in or near his hoodie pocket, where his knife was. He had grabbed the knife earlier that day for protection after his friend had been jumped by Black Power members the day earlier, but at that moment he wasn’t thinking about the weapon at all, he said.

“At that stage I felt, like, scared,” he told jurors of the fight. “I felt, like, lost. I didn’t know what to do. At that stage, I thought, ‘He’s going to get me.’”

He then threw a punch, he said, pausing before adding, “with a knife in my hand”.

“I was just scared. It just happened and I was reacting.”

But the defendant’s insistence he wasn’t aware of the knife and didn’t even realise it was in his hand as he threw the first punch beggars belief, the Crown responded.

After the first strikes, which left Poutapu bleeding from two cuts to his face, McClintock noted that CCTV footage showed the defendant with his hand behind his back – concealing the knife, she said, until there was an opening to strike again.

Police investigate the fatal stabbing of Epapara Poutapu at the Albany bus station in September 2023. Photo / Dean Purcell

“There’s nothing unintentional about that,” the prosecutor said. “He’s about to strike with lethal force, and he knows it. ... He’s not flailing around. He’s an armed man, ready to pounce. He’s going to finish this.”

There was also no indication of fear, McClintock said, noting that unbiased bystanders recalled both men taunting each other. The defendant’s 18-year-old friend, meanwhile, was described by the prosecutor as on the sidelines “egging this on” and ready to jump in if needed. He didn’t jump in, she said, because the defendant “had this completely under control”.

McClintock argued that the murder was intentional. But at the very least, she added, it was a reckless murder – a killing that occurs when a person uses deadly force knowing that they are gambling with someone’s life even if death isn’t explicitly intended. Jurors didn’t have to be unanimous on which kind of murder it was as long as each individual felt the defendant’s actions met either of those two definitions.

“[The defendant] was young, but be careful with the suggestion that means he didn’t know what he was doing,” McClintock said. “Yes, young people can be prone to impulsiveness. They’re still subject to the law.

“This was lethal violence and it was murder, plain and simple.”

The jury’s manslaughter decision was a non sequitur of sorts – a rejection of self-defence, which would have required a complete acquittal, but a finding that the teen had no murderous intent. Manslaughter, like murder, carries a maximum possible sentence of life imprisonment but generally results in shorter terms of imprisonment and sometimes home detention.

Justice Graham set a sentencing date for the week before Christmas. The teen’s name suppression is expected at that point to either lift or become permanent, depending on what the judge decides.

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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