Murder accused aimed for 'home run'

The 16-year-old who hit pizza delivery man Michael Choy with a baseball bat did not care where he struck him, "so long as he silenced him," a jury heard yesterday.

"The Crown says that he intended to hit a home run that night," Crown counsel Christine Gordon said in her closing address to the jury in the High Court at Auckland.

The youth - who turned 16 today - is one of six young people aged 13 to 17 accused of murdering the 40-year-old Pizza Hut delivery worker on September 12 last year.

Four are accused of robbing him and five are accused of the attempted robbery of a KFC worker three days earlier.

According to the Crown, the group lured Mr Choy to a dimly lit part of Chantal Place in Papakura where they attacked him to rob him of his food orders and money. Ms Gordon reminded the jury of the hitter's police statement where he said he hit Mr Choy so that he would not yell out for help.

"Where do you hit someone so they won't yell out? You hit them in the head," Ms Gordon said.

The youth's lawyer, Ron Mansfield, has indicated that he would have pleaded guilty to manslaughter and had already admitted robbing Mr Choy and later going back and stealing his money belt.

But Ms Gordon told the jury that he had "only gone part of the way" to accepting responsibility for what he had done.

Mr Mansfield's questions to doctors about the possibility of Mr Choy surviving had he received medical attention in time indicated a "rather desperate defence".

She said that it was irrelevant to what the jury had to consider - what the youth intended at the time.

The Crown did not say that it was a deliberate killing. It relied on another "murderous intent" where an offender means to cause grievous bodily injury during a robbery and death resulted.

The fractured skull showed what the youth had in mind.

Ms Gordon said that another youth, 17-year-old Phillip Kaukasi, was one of the main planners - if not the main planner - of the ambush.

Like all the others accused of murder, including his girlfriend, 17-year-old Whatarangi Rawiri, he was a party to the killing by the 16-year-old hitter, said Ms Gordon.

For murder as a party, Ms Gordon said, the Crown had to prove there was a common intention to rob a driver, that each knew that it was probable one of the group would hit the driver and that it was known that it was probable that grievous bodily injury would be intentionally inflicted during the robbery. She said they had set out to commit a robbery and ended up committing murder.