Pauline Timu sentenced for manslaughter over the death of 8-year-old Rickah’Shae Keefe-Haerewa

Pauline Timu has been sentenced for manslaughter following the death of 8-year-old Te Teko boy Rickah'Shae Keefe-Haerewa (inset) in November 2024.

Warning: This story deals with the death of a child and may be distressing.

Pauline Timu has been sentenced for her role in the death of 8-year-old Te Teko boy Rickah’Shae Keefe-Haerewa, as well as a decade’s worth of ill-treatment and violence to children in her care.

In the High Court at Hamilton today, the 62-year-old appeared for sentence on 12 charges, the most serious of which was manslaughter.

Timu was the legal guardian of Rickah’Shae when, on November 15, 2024, she put him in the back of her car, after he’d allegedly suffered a serious assault at the hands of another person.

But rather than race to Whakatāne Hospital, she pulled over for between seven and nine minutes, and rang another occupant of her house to warn that police might be coming to their address.

When she arrived at the hospital with Rickah’Shae, medical staff found him in the backseat, unresponsive.

Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead.

His cause of death was determined as blunt force trauma to the abdomen, but he was found to have other injuries, including signs of historic injuries consistent with non-accidental assault.

According to an agreed summary of facts, on the day Rickah’Shae died, Timu had slapped him in the mouth as a “punishment for lying”.

Rickah'Shae Keefe-Haerewa, also known as Joppy, died in 2024.

It’s alleged that, later that day, he suffered a serious assault by another person.

Timu failed to intervene.

When she was in her car with him later, and it was apparent he needed medical care, she still failed to seek it, pulling over to make phone calls.

None of them were to emergency services.

Timu pleaded guilty to manslaughter, admitting to causing Rickah’Shae’s death by an omission – namely failing without lawful excuse to provide him, being a child in her care, with necessaries and take reasonable steps to protect him from injury.

She also pleaded guilty to other charges, some of them representative, that related to ill-treatment and ongoing violence towards Rickah’Shae.

She accepted slapping him or “booting his bum”, hitting him with a pole or stick as discipline, whipping him with a cord, and sometimes filming the assaults to embarrass him.

In the three years she had legal custody of him, he was regularly observed with black eyes.

She would shave off his hair as a punishment, keep him home from school for “weeks at a time” without justification, and send him to school without food.

Then she would tell the school not to provide him with the free school lunches.

She earlier also pleaded guilty to violence charges related to other children, some of whom were in her full-time care, with the offending dating back to 2013.

They included charges of assault, assault with a weapon, and ill-treatment of children.

The summaries of facts detailed assaults against several children, including punches to the arms and stomach, and hits to the face, that were hard enough to leave bruises.

She hit one child with a belt and a wooden spoon.

On one occasion, she punched a young teen in her care in the mouth, causing the teen’s lip to bleed. The punch forced the teen’s head back, and it hit a door.

The summary said that when she hit one of the boys in her care, it was so hard that it hurt her own shoulder.

Ill-treatment charges Timu admitted included shaving the children’s hair to embarrass them, and withholding food.

Now, she has been sentenced to 11 years and seven months’ imprisonment; however, for legal reasons, further details about how the sentence was reached, the judge’s comments, and other details cannot be reported at this stage.

Justice James MacGillivray adopted a starting point of 14 years and six months.

This was comprised of seven years and six months for the offending against Rickah’shae, and an uplift of a further seven years for the offending against the other children, all of whom have name suppression.

The judge gave Timu a 15% discount for her guilty plea, and a 5% discount for background factors.

The judge imposed a minimum period of imprisonment of 50%, meaning that Timu will need to serve at least half of the 11 years and seven months before she is eligible for parole.

Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.