Huntly man Neahemea Dey given home detention heads to house to drink beers instead

Neahemea Dey should have gone straight home but went and drank beers with his whānau instead. File Photo / AFP

A man told by a judge to go straight home after being given a home detention sentence, went and drank beers with his whānau instead.

And when police finally caught up with Neahemea Dey at his Huntly home, later that night, he did a runner through neighbouring properties and over four fences.

An officer suffered a cut to his forearm while arresting Dey, who told him that he “would have got away if I didn’t hurt my leg jumping over the fence”.

The 34-year-old has since spent the past six months in custody and appeared in the Hamilton District Court for sentencing and re-sentencing on his old and new charges.

There was no chance he’d be getting any evening refreshments this time though, as Judge Gordon Matenga gave him jail time.

‘You drank beers and lost track of time’

Dey was sentenced to 10 months’ home detention in the Huntly District Court in August on charges of injuring with intent to injure and unlawful taking of a motor vehicle.

He was instructed by Judge Denise Clark to head straight home and wait for his electronic monitoring equipment to be fitted.

However, when the Corrections officer arrived, firstly at 5pm and then 8pm, Dey was nowhere to be found.

Judge Matenga said Dey’s brother called him, and Dey “cheekily” told him to tell the officer to wait 30 minutes.

“But you never showed up,” Judge Matenga said.

“You stopped at whānau property and had a few beers and then lost track of time.”

Police instead turned up at his home just after 10pm that evening to arrest him, but Dey pulled his arm away from the officer, shouting “no”, before running out of the rear of the property, through a gap in the fence.

It was then that he ran through four properties, each of which had a fence.

Police caught up with him, and Dey lay on the ground with his arms and hands underneath his body, refusing to release them.

He told the officer he didn’t want to go back to prison, and would have got away if he hadn’t hurt his leg, jumping over the fence.

‘Extremely idiotic’

Dey’s counsel told the judge his client’s offending was “extremely idiotic”, adding that he knew he would be going to jail.

He asked that he issue a sentence of 23 months’ jail.

“I’m not surprised that you were arrested and you have been in custody ever since,” Judge Matenga told Dey as he stood in the dock this afternoon for sentencing.

Looking at his criminal history, the judge noted he had 14 convictions for failing to comply with court bail and nine for breaches of various community-based sentences, including community work, supervision, and intensive supervision.

“So that leaves the only other option to a term of imprisonment, and again, unsurprisingly, the recommendation is imprisonment.”

Judge Matenga took a starting point of 20 months’ jail for the earlier offending and added another four months for his latest charges of resisting police and escaping police custody.

He cancelled his active sentences of home detention, community work, judicial monitoring, and emotional harm reparation because now that he was in jail, he had no means to pay it.

Dey was sentenced to 24 months’ jail.

Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for 11 years and has been a journalist for 22.