He maintains the mother financially benefited from his arrest. He claims she was disgruntled because he’d refused to have a romantic relationship with her and she co-operated with the police in relation to his case, to have charges against her dropped.
The woman denied all the man’s claims.
Yesterday, the mother described to the jury the time she’d spent with the man in her home as a “house of horrors”, alleging she was punched, kicked and suffocated by him.
Today, two video interviews with the woman’s teenage son were played to the jury in the Wellington District Court.
In them, the teenager described how the man would hit him and his mother often without warning, or if something made him angry.
He alleged the man would hit him if he did something wrong, whacking him over his head or punching him in the face.
“He threw spray cans at me when I p***ed him off and I’d done something wrong,” he said.
On other occasions, he described how he’d be punched without warning, including on one occasion when the two were delivering drugs in his mother’s car.
Despite not being old enough to hold a driver’s licence, the teenager drove because the man was disqualified.
He alleged the man became angry and punched him while they were driving on the motorway after the teen had narrowly avoided a barrier.
On another occasion, he said he was helping the man to fix their toilet when he did something to make the man angry. As a result, the man hit him in the face, leaving him with a bleeding nose and blood on the floor, walls and his clothing.
Later, when they were searching for the man’s drug stash, which he kept in the car, the teenager said the man grew frustrated at being unable to find it and allegedly hit him over the back of the head with a back scratcher so hard it made him cry.
‘You were making up claims’
Under questioning by James Mahuta-Coyle, who has been appointed as the man’s stand-by counsel, the teenager denied making up or exaggerating his allegations to the police.
“When you gave your interview to the police, you were making up claims in order to help your mother, who was also making claims against [the man]?” Mahuta-Coyle asked the teenager.
“Incorrect,” he responded.
Regarding the driving incident, Mahuta-Coyle said the man denied punching the teenager in the car.
Instead, the man said the teen had failed to check the mirrors, as he’d suggested, and in doing so narrowly avoided hitting another car.
Mahuta-Coyle said the man’s evidence was that the teenager had overcorrected after narrowly missing the vehicle, and in response, the man had grabbed the steering wheel.
“You turned a frightening driving incident into an allegation of assault,” Mahuta-Coyle said.
“That’s false,” the teenager replied.
In relation to the bathroom incident, Mahuta-Coyle suggested the man had renovated the bathroom rather than simply fixing the toilet.
The man accepted he may have thrown a piece of wood at the teenager after he was startled when the latter dropped a piece of flooring.
But Mahuta-Coyle suggested the incident couldn’t have happened because the pair stood on different levels to fix the floor.
The man stood on the subfloor, while the teenager stood on the floor above.
The teenager denied the man’s account.
Mahuta-Coyle also suggested the man hadn’t hit the teenager with a back scratcher but had instead given him a light tap on the shoulder to let him know it was there. The teenager had used it to reach into parts of the car that the man couldn’t.
Again, the teenager denied that version of events.
The jury trial before Judge Peter Hobbs is scheduled to run until the end of next week.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.
