Tauranga family violence trial: Man accused of pushing partner out of car; smashing head on concrete

Marc Hunter has been accused of pushing his partner out of a car, and onto the gravel, before smashing her head into the concrete. However, his partner says she can no longer remember the events that led to the allegations.

Warning: This story deals with allegations of domestic violence and may be distressing.

A woman told police she was pushed from a moving car by her partner before she was beaten by him, including having her face smashed into the concrete.

However, she now says she “can’t remember” the instances of violence the Crown alleges happened after a “summer’s day out” with family at a watering hole near Paeroa.

The woman said during her evidence that she has seizures that affect her memory, and she has also spent the last year “pushing [the incident] to the back of her head”, and could no longer remember details.

Marc Hunter is on trial in the Tauranga District Court where he denies the five charges he faces related to the domestic violence allegations.

Marc Hunter is faces five charges related to alleged domestic violence. The trial in the Tauranga District Court is expected to take three days.

The Crown case is Hunter was in a relationship with the woman when the pair, with their two children, and Hunter’s brother and mother, went to a water hole on February 6 last year.

The Crown says that as they were leaving, Hunter “got angry at [the woman]”, and pushed her out of the car on to the road.

“What then followed was the first of the defendant’s two serious assaults on [the woman], resulting in her normally blonde hair turning pink with blood,” prosecutor Molly Tutton-Harris told the jury.

He had smashed her head into the gravel, the Crown says, as well as punching and kicking her.

The Crown says he then apologised and hugged her, told her he loved her, and she got back into the car.

After getting back into the car, Hunter allegedly told her he was taking her back to his mum’s basement where he would “f*** her up”.

Tutton-Harris said as she was trying to alert police who they had driven past, the car door was opened while they were travelling 100km/h along the State Highway and the woman nearly fell out.

Hunter pulled over, before allegedly dragging her out of the car, inflicting a second assault, and then left her “beaten and bruised” on the side of the road.

Motorists saw her, came to her aid, and she was taken to hospital where she was spoken to by police.

In her video statement, taken from her hospital bed, she described being “covered with bumps and bruises”.

“Now my kids have to see me like this,” she told the officers.

She said Hunter had tried to “guilt-trip” her into not reporting the incident, and had made her feel like she was a “bad mum”.

During the trial on Monday, however, the woman said most of what happened was “a big blur”.

She could only remember small sections, including being on the ground near the car, but not how she got there.

She could recall the car door being opened, looking down at the grass “going really fast underneath” her, and then falling on to the gravel.

However, she could not remember any punches or kicks she’d described in her video interview, nor any of the allegations in her written statement.

Her written statement was admitted as evidence in a ruling given by the judge, due to her difficulty remembering, which means the jury will be able to refer to that as evidence.

When it came to cross-examination, Hunter’s lawyer Rebekah Webby put to the woman a very different account of the afternoon.

She said the woman had been drinking during the afternoon and was intoxicated when they left the watering hole. The woman accepted she’d been beyond “tipsy”, but hadn’t been fully intoxicated.

Webby suggested the injuries happened when the woman fell over at least twice on gravel, partly due to her intoxication and partly due to her footwear.

The woman said she could remember falling over once, but not the second time. Eventually, she conceded she could have fallen over twice, but didn’t know whether her injuries had been from those falls.

Again she said she “couldn’t recall” the alleged violence.

Webby suggested the chaos in the car, which occurred after she’d hopped back into the car a second time, had been the woman’s doing.

She put to the woman that she’d removed her young son from his car seat and had been holding him in the front while trying to lean out the window.

The others in the car had been trying to get the child back into his seat, Webby said.

The woman denied this.

She said she’d wanted her children to be let out of the car with her once it stopped, but she never had her son in the front seat with her, and she had never leaned out the window with him.

She maintained that as she’d been trying to get the police’s attention, someone in the car had opened the door, again repeating she’d seen the “grass going underneath” her.

However, she now believed that must have been someone in the back seat who opened the door, as she didn’t remember seeing Hunter’s tattoos on the arm that reached across.

“The door opened, I hung on to the car door, and that’s when he started to slow down because he could see I was starting to fall out,” the woman told Webby.

Webby put to her that at this point no one had pushed her out, and no one had been violent towards her.

“Not that I recall but like I said, all the violence is quite blurry, all the injuries and how I got them,” she said.

The woman will continue under cross-examination when the trial resumes on Tuesday.

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.