KEY POINTS:
After sitting through a trial no mother would ever want to face, Linda Sauaki - the mother of a convicted killer - has an important message for other parents raising teenagers in South Auckland.
"Parents need to take more responsibility right now in South Auckland. We have a much bigger job in watching our kids and knowing where they are. We have to be responsible.
"You have to watch the attitudes and you will see the changes. You have to be aware and to know where they are."
Ms Sauaki says she wants others to learn from her son Jio-Pene's mistake ... a mistake that nearly destroyed her family and took the life of Manurewa teenager Kelly Lawrence.
"We need to learn from it and move on. We are sorry," she says.
It was 2am on July 9, 2006, when Ms Sauaki received a phone call every parent dreads. It was from police saying her son was in custody after a stabbing.
Though she was in shock it wasn't until Ms Sauaki was in a police car and on her way to the station that she learned the stabbing was fatal. Reality quickly sank in.
"That's when I just totally lost it, I was like 'my kid's been involved in a murder'."
Her son's subsequent arrest had wider implications than most people realised.
"Every incident that we hear about it's always about the victim's family, but we suffered too ... After all this happened, things changed dramatically in my house."
There was guilt, blame, anger and a feeling that she and her husband hadn't done enough to keep Jio-Pene out of trouble.
There were threatening phone calls and some of Ms Sauaki's seven other children started getting into fights at school.
"It was a downfall for all my boys. They started to get in trouble at school, a lot of fighting, because [they were] always being scared of running into someone from Kelly's family and not wanting anyone at their school to know that it was their brother who had done the stabbing."
Sauaki's 14-year-old brother, who Sauaki says he was trying to protect the night of the murder, felt guilty.
"He blamed himself for not doing anything [that night]. He started trying to work out and grow up from a little boy who wasn't going to be scared of anything again."
Ms Sauaki struggled to keep her family together, knowing the most important thing they needed was love and support. That included Sauaki.
She said she had tried hard to keep him out of trouble as he was growing up.
Last year she moved her family away from Otahuhu and into a $400 a week home in Manurewa after Sauaki got himself involved in a serious assault on two teenagers. She thought Manurewa was far enough away from Otahuhu and the boys he knew there.
"I never cared about how much I had to pay - $400 a week was not an issue as long as I thought I was doing my part in keeping my kids safe, but I have been proved totally wrong."
Now, having sat through a murder trial which has sealed Sauaki's fate for a good number of years, Ms Sauaki hopes other parents will learn a lesson. She hopes they won't have to go through what her family endured.
"I know I tried everything I could [to keep Sauaki out of trouble] but I think parents need to take more responsibility right now in South Auckland."
"If [kids] want to get dropped off somewhere at night, make sure it's safe. If you know you can't be at a place [to pick them up], then find another parent who can."
