Police later recovered social media messages sent by the teenager to friends, which read: “I just lined the wheel up with his head and boosted,” and “F*** yeah, I shouldn’t have done that”.
Justice Dale La Hood sent the jury out to begin deliberations about 3.30pm on Wednesday.
Yesterday afternoon, the jury returned almost exactly 24 hours later with their verdicts.
The teen was found guilty of manslaughter on the first count, but murder relating to the second strike.
A relieved-looking Ronaki was found guilty of manslaughter and attempting to pervert the course of justice, after telling police she was the driver.
The pair were convicted by Justice La Hood and remanded in custody for sentencing in October.
‘Run him over then’
Earlier, Crown solicitor Marc Corlett KC submitted most of what happened wasn’t disputed and largely came from the teen’s interview with police that night.
He asked the jury to look at how it all started, with Ronaki upset with Paul for taking the $500, and then telling the teen she’d give him $200 if he helped get it back.
They went driving around looking for Paul.
Ronaki and Paul were then on the phone to each other, yelling, before he was spotted in the street.
He was yelling that they should hit him before Ronaki told the teen to “run him over then”.
He did and Paul was thrown over the windscreen and suffered a serious head injury on the road. The teen then performed a u-turn and struck him again, this time causing chest-crush injuries.
Corlett said hitting Paul a second time, showed his intention to kill him.
‘Situation of extreme stress’
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, said the teen, who faced two charges of murder for each time Paul was struck, had a history of trauma and on the night acted impulsively without forethought in an extremely stressful situation.
He said “all hell broke loose” during the phone call in the car and the whole incident took about 1 minute and 14 seconds.
Mansfield said it would have been a “matter of seconds” between the teen seeing Paul and hitting him.
He had no motive to kill him and had told police he just wanted the arguing to stop and to go home and was just acting “in the moment”.
The teen didn’t realise he would kill him and just figured Paul might have to go to hospital.
He was simply a “traumatised teen put in a situation of extreme stress”, Mansfield said.
Mansfield also told the jury they couldn’t be sure that Paul was still alive when he was struck a second time, so his client should be found not guilty of a second murder charge.
‘An empty threat’
On behalf of Ronaki, defence counsel Andrew Schulze, said when Ronaki told the teen to “run [Paul] over”, it was an “empty threat” and never intended for the teen to carry it out.
She had also tried to grab the steering wheel before Paul was struck a second time, but the teen had a strong grip.
In evidence, she said she had no recollection of telling him to do that, but had since accepted she must have.
She had also acted impulsively and without foresight due to her flight or fight response from her intoxication and PTSD after suffering earlier assaults at Paul’s hands.
Ronaki also tried unsuccessfully to defend a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice after telling police she was driving the car that night.
Corlett submitted her police interview made it clear that she was trying to prevent the right person from being charged.
Schulze argued it wasn’t straightforward and she was still drunk when she gave her police interview.
Police also hadn’t cautioned her that she could be prosecuted for giving a false statement and she simply wanted to protect the teen.
Justice La Hood said while intoxication was relevant to her state of mind and could cloud someone’s judgment, “a drunken intent is still an intent for the purposes of the law”.
Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for nine years and has been a journalist for 20.
