Teenager Kyle Le Lievre sentenced for crowd brawl outside Richmond pub that led to woman being stabbed

Queen Street in Richmond, near Nelson, where patrons drinking at a bar were taunted by youths, resulting in a woman being stabbed. Photo / Google

A teenager who stabbed a woman, instead of the man he was aiming for while the pair were trying to defuse a fight outside a pub, shed tears as he apologised today.

Kyle Le Lievre, who was 18 at the time, was part of a group of teens who late one night in May last year had gathered on the pavement outside a bar in Richmond, near Nelson, yelling at patrons drinking there.

The evening ended with the 28-year-old woman, who had been at the bar with friends and who had tried to intervene to calm the situation, being taken to hospital by ambulance after she was stabbed in the arm by Le Lievre.

He had targeted the face of the man she was standing beside.

During his sentencing in the Nelson District Court, the now 19-year-old told Judge Jo Rielly from a custody suite where he was on remand for breaching bail conditions, that prison had been a huge wake-up call for him, especially after he was assaulted on his first day there.

“I don’t like it at all. On the first day, I had my nose broken and my teeth chipped but it’s been good to get here for a re-set.”

A teenager sentenced on a violence charge told Judge Jo Rielly he was sorry for letting so many people down, including himself.

He said to reach this point, it had been a “long, long hard road” and he felt he had let a lot of people down, including himself.

Defence lawyer Rachael Raukawa described Le Lievre as a young man who had struggled, and who was in an “embryonic” stage of rehabilitation which might be derailed by a prison sentence.

The victim, who was not in court, said in a statement read by Crown prosecutor Abigail Goodison that she was worried Le Lievre was seen as someone younger people might look up to when they were better being as far away from him as possible.

The victim also described how anxious she was for the young people gathered that night.

While multiple people were involved in the melee outside the pub, Le Lievre ended up facing the most serious charges.

He pleaded guilty to a charge of wounding with reckless disregard, having initially been charged with more serious violent offending.

It was just after 11 pm on the night of May 24 last year when Le Lievre, who was in Nelson visiting family and friends from where he lived in the North Island, was among the group of young people gathered outside the bar.

They had been hanging around for about 30 minutes, yelling at the bar patrons.

One of the patrons went out on the street and asked them to leave.

Le Lievre and the rest of the group then converged on him, and sensing the trouble, the woman and other people who had also been at the bar, went out on the street to support the man.

The woman stood between the man and the teens and asked them to go home.

A verbal row erupted between the youths and the adults.

It continued for several minutes before another of the bar’s patrons got into his car and drove towards the group of teens. .

Le Lievre and the group ran and hid, but moments later emerged from a nearby alleyway holding rocks they began to throw at the man in his car.

The man started chasing one of the teens on foot, who ran away, but not before Le Lievre kicked him and then punched him twice in the head with a closed fist.

As the other adults ran to help him, Le Lievre’s group again ran off down an alleyway.

As this was happening, one of the teens was tackled and assaulted by another of the bar patrons.

The woman and the man she had initially helped then turned their attention to supporting the teen.

Le Lievre, also intent on helping the young person, came running out of the alleyway with a knife in his hand, raised it to head height and thrust it at the man’s face.

The woman raised her arm in a gesture indicating the teen to go home, which blocked the knife from hitting the man’s face. It instead went into the woman’s right arm near her elbow.

She was taken to hospital bleeding heavily from the knife wound.

Judge Rielly said the incident would never have happened if the group had not been taunting the people at the bar.

She said it would be cold comfort to the victim to know that Le Lievre had acted out of concern for the wellbeing of a younger member of the group.

The judge also accepted Le Lievre’s sincere regret for the harm caused to the woman.

“In your somewhat immature way, you have tried to explain why this happened but you have always expressed extreme remorse for the harm to the victim.”

From a starting point of 19.5 months in prison, Le Lievre was given credit for his guilty plea, his youth and his remorse, plus time spent in custody and on electronic bail.

The reduction meant Judge Rielly was able to consider an alternative sentence of home detention, about which she had thought long and hard.

Le Lievre was sentenced to a maximum of six months of community detention with a strict night time curfew, plus two years of intensive supervision with a list of conditions aimed at rehabilitation.

Le Lievre was also subject to regular judicial monitoring, which meant his progress would be monitored, and if he fell by the wayside, the option remained for him to be re-sentenced.

“I want you to reach the age of 21 and be living a good life - a pro-social life,” Judge Rielly said.

Le Lievre said prison was a “really rough place” and somewhere he would not wish on anyone he knew.

Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.