The five men are alleged to have murdered fellow Tribesmen gang member Mark Hohua in June 2022. Video / Belinda Feek
The partner of a patched Tribesmen Aotearoa member allegedly beaten to death by his own group, lays the blame for the ‘hot-box’ attack at the feet of the gang’s president.
“I hate him,” Rebecca Van Der Aa told Conway Rapana’s defence counsel Steve Franklin in the High Court atHamilton yesterday.
“I have no respect for him at all,” she said.
Rapana, the gang’s president, together with vice-president Heremaia Gage, and patched members Ngahere Tapara and Te Patukino Biddle, and prospect Dean Collier, are on trial for the murder of Mark Hohua.
The crown alleges that Hohua, known as Shark, died after a ‘hot-box’ attack on June 18, 2022, by the defendants.
A hot-box is where gang members dish out “discipline” on one of their own after alleged “wrongdoings or offences”.
In Hohua’s case, he allegedly set up a direct debit using the gang’s bank account from online website, Layaway, which sells homeware and personal items and incurred a $1200 debt.
Crown solicitor Richard Jenson told the jury that word quickly spread, and Rapana sanctioned the hot-box on the 48-year-old, which caused his fatal injuries.
Te Patukino Biddle, Heremaia Gage, Ngahere Tapara, Conway Rapana, and Dean Collier pictured during their first trial in the High Court at Rotorua last year. The trial was abandoned after the judge became ill. Photo / Andrew Warner
Biddle’s defence counsel, Matthew Goodwin, claimed that while the hot-box had “gone wrong”, Hohua was killed by a critical head injury he suffered when he fell down “steep and treacherous stairs” on Rapana’s rural Waimana property.
That was why his client pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter at the start of the re-trial.
Hohua was rushed to Whakatāne Hospital by Collier and another gang member, but died the following day.
‘He was warned not to go’
Rebecca Van Der Aa lived with Hohua in Whakatāne.
Questioned by Jenson, she said Hohua grew up in Murupara and was “practically born into” gangs.
He became a patched member of another gang in 2018 before joining the Tribesmen, not long before he died, she said.
Hohua had known Rapana for more than 20 years, and Rapana and Hohua’s brother, Matiu, later established the gang in 2020 or 2021.
In evidence, Van Der Aa said on the morning of Hohua’s death, they were woken by a phone call about 6am.
Hohua then went to visit Matiu.
He returned about 8.30am and told her he had been warned that he was going to get hot-boxed at a gang hui that morning for the money going missing.
That included helping sort anger and drug issues, getting him back into fitness and letting him stay at his Hodges Rd property when he needed to, Goodwin said.
Van Der Aa agreed and explained that Hohua had a rough childhood, had developed bipolar and was a meth addict.
But he was tough and knew how to handle himself, she said.
The trial is set down for four weeks before a jury and Justice David Johnstone.
Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for 10 years and has been a journalist for 21.
