Likely the worst thing about the killing of security guard Ramandeep Singh in Auckland during December 2023 – not that there is anything good to be found in this entirely cynical and remorseless murder, described by the sentencing judge on July 31 as “callous” but which could rather have been described as base, inhuman, performed by two men with the minds of dogs – was his size. He was 25 years old and weighed 46kg, or 7 stone 3 pounds.
“I’ve seen that guard,” said a parent of one of his co-killers, in a conversation intercepted by police. “He’s like an innocent-as dude, he’s small.”
He was as flimsy as a ragdoll, picked up by his hi-vis vest and thrown against the windscreen of his Armourguard car when he turned up to lock the car park gates at Royal Reserve in Massey, West Auckland, just before midnight on December 17, 2023.
It’s an attractive park with lots of green space. Dogwalkers and young mums with prams trot around its edges. There is a children’s playground designed with three excellent forts. It’s up high in the hills, with views towards the Auckland Harbour Bridge, and Rangitoto Island sneaking up behind the North Shore. A track through ferns and dappled sunlight on Rush Creek leads to the Westgate mall. There are rosellas in the gum trees and spur-winged plovers on the fields. A pretty place, really, and a relief from the ugly surrounding neighbourhood of houses with busted fences and old bombs parked on unmown lawns.
Massey, always Massey, in the geography of violent crimes in the West Auckland zones of methamphetamine and weapons. Around the corner from Royal Reserve is Reynella Dr, where Constable Matthew Hunt was shot and killed on June 19, 2020. A framed portrait of Hunt takes pride of place at the police station in nearby Henderson.
There’s another memorial to a slaying at the border of Henderson and Massey. In a horrible parallel to the killing of Ramandeep Singh, security guard Charanpreet Dhaliwal – another young immigrant taking on low-paid patrol work to help support himself, and his family in India – was beaten to death on the job at a construction site on Lincoln Rd on November 17, 2011. He has a plaque in his name beside flowerbeds at Te Pai Park.
There is nothing in honour of Ramandeep Singh. He travelled alone to secure roadblock barriers at the Royal Reserve car park around midnight a week before Christmas. There is a scruffy kind of traffic island in the car park. It faces a stand of flax and other natives. It’s where he was thrown like trash and left to die.
His attackers were drinking two 18-packs of Woodstock bourbon and cola and watching Mad Max that night at a house in Reverie Pl. It’s a shabby little cul-de-sac of 16 homes. It rises up a hill over the road from the reserve. A child’s abandoned scooter and old paint tins lie in weeds at the bottom. A punching bag is set up beside a garage and a lean-to has been created with tarpaulin. Lorenzo Tangira, 26, “and other associates” as court documents put it, rolled down the hill to the Royal Reserve car park.
Singh arrived. He was punched in the face, repeatedly, and pursued when he ran to his car. He got in, tried to close the door and signal for help, but Tangira’s hand got jammed in the door and he was pulled out and beaten to death.
A post-mortem revealed significant brain damage. His top and bottom jaw were broken in several places. From the statement of facts, “Footwear impressions showed kicking and stomping damage to his face, throat and neck.”
Tangira, a tall, strongly built man with a rat’s tail sticking out of the back of his head, pleaded not guilty and went to trial in June. On the opening morning, he changed his plea to guilty. He was asked if he had anything to say before he was sentenced at the High Court at Auckland. “Nah,” he replied.
Alysha McClintock, made unfortunately famous for losing the Polkinghorne case, appeared for the crown. She read out victim impact reports from Singh’s family. One word was used four times: “torture”. His sister wrote, “He was tortured and brutally murdered.” His father wrote, “He was only doing his job, but was brutally beaten and tortured.”
Tangira was represented by defence lawyers Vivienne Feyen and Mark Edgar, dowdy High Court regulars who arrived late. “Sorry, Crown,” they apologised.
Justice Geoff Venning appeared seconds later. He has seen it all before, a veteran judge of calm demeanour who often looks on proceedings with a sorrowful expression, and has no patience for flannel and bluster. In her sentencing submissions, Feyen said to him Tangira accepted he was at the car park but did not accept he was responsible for inflicting the continued assault that killed Singh. Venning sighed and said, “Ms Feyen, he’s pleaded guilty to murder.”
She accepted that. She said Tangira had expressed remorse. The judge did not accept that.
“You have written a letter to the court in which you express remorse,” he told Tangira. “I have read and considered your letter. I consider your expressions of remorse and regret in it to be self-serving … I do not accept them as genuine or as warranting any reduction from sentence.”
McClintock asked for 15 years. Feyen asked for “around 11 years”. Venning gave only as much discount as he felt compelled to concede – a more or less automatic reduction of nine months for pleading guilty and six months in recognition of his “disadvantaged background”, which included the fact “you were subjected to undue violence by your father”. There were no other discounts, no other favours. “There are no mitigating features to the offending.”
He asked him to stand. Tangira stood, and looked massive in the dock, a strong guy obviously twice the weight of Singh. He wore shorts, and his long arms hung by his side. He had a handsome, soulful face, and smiled when he turned to greet his friends and family sitting behind him.
No one was there to bear witness for Singh. Justice Venning sentenced Tangira to a minimum non-parole period of 13 years, nine months. “Stand down.” The prisoner turned to farewell his whānau and gave a carefree laugh.
Potentially volatile
Politicians, union officials and security company leaders all expressed despair at Singh’s killing when asked by the Listener for comment, but spoke only in generalities when it came to the matter of sending a guard weighing 46kg to a potentially volatile part of Auckland, by himself, at midnight.
“A big issue from our point of view is security guards working alone. It poses a huge health and safety risk,” said Georgie Dansey, who works with the security sector in her role at the E tū union. She had not heard of the Singh killing until she was asked to comment.
Neither had Labour MP Phil Twyford, who represented Massey before electoral boundary changes. He went away and read about it. He called back, and said, “It seems eerily, miserably reminiscent of the murder of Charanpreet Dhaliwal.” He meant the security guard killed on his first night in the job on Lincoln Rd, Henderson, in 2011. Twyford was instrumental in arranging the Te Pai Park memorial.
“It’s a striking coincidence that these two young men both came from the Punjab. Both full of hope and optimism about making a new life in New Zealand. Both victims of such senseless violence and in both cases their mothers are just grieving and distraught.”
As for the killing of Singh, he said, “There are big questions about New Zealand’s health and safety culture and the fact that we put people in harm’s way like this. The consequences are awful. But you have to consider this really random, brutal violence in our community. Where does that come from? My god.”
Singh was licensed to work in security. He would have been issued with PPE gear. Matt Stevenson, chief executive of High Security Management in Hastings, and a board member at the New Zealand Security Association, said it’s critical for mobile security guards to assess the situation before they get out of their vehicle.
“With our guys, it’s about reporting into our monitoring room here that everything looks clear. And if there was a situation where it looked like there’s a bunch of people up to no good or that type of stuff, that’s when you’d stay in your vehicle. These guys aren’t paid enough to be out of their vehicle to confront people.”
Was the going rate about $25-$30 an hour? “That’d be a fair comment.”
Jeff Sissons is the chief executive of the NZ Institute of Safety Management. In 2015, he acted as counsel for the Council of Trade Unions during the coroner’s inquiry into the killing of Charanpreet Dhaliwal.
“I think about it less often than I did previously, but it still haunts me,” he said. “And I’m very much struck by the similarities with this death [of Ramandeep Singh]. Another family back in India who sent their child to New Zealand for a better life and then get the phone call saying, ‘I’m sorry, your child has been killed.’ That’s … I mean that’s … yeah. We’re asking migrant workers to do some of our most dangerous jobs. And we’re not protecting them as well as we could.”
A man was charged with Dhaliwal’s murder. He had been with three friends who were denied entry to Chicks nightclub on The Concourse in Henderson – hard to picture what kind of club in that industrial zone; the town dump is at the end of the road – and ran from an angry bouncer to a Lincoln Rd construction site beside RNZ’s cream art-deco transmitter station.
Dhaliwal was studying IT at a college in New Lynn. A friend asked him to guard the site; it was his birthday, and he wanted the night off. Dhaliwal had no training. He met a representative from CNE Security onsite. He was given a hi-vis vest and shown around. Hours later, he was hit in the head with a piece of wood and killed. The jury gave a verdict of not guilty.
The Department of Labour prosecuted CNE Security, but that failed, too.
“That just seemed incredible to me at the time,” said Twyford. Sissons shared Twyford’s disbelief, saying the prosecution was poorly handled.
“And the employer got off. So, the coronial inquiry was really the last chance to make something positive out of that tragic set of circumstances and to push for better protection of security staff.”
A lot did come out of the inquiry. Coroner JP Ryan rebuked the security industry and called for a new set of enforcements to license, train and protect guard personnel. They were duly established.
Gary Morrison, chief executive of the New Zealand Security Association, outlined the implementations. “We’ve now got a reasonably robust licensing regime in place. Mandatory training requirements for staff working as security officers were done fairly quickly. And the third improvement was around having a good code of practice.”
He was proud of the new measures. They were responsible and effective. But none of it made any difference to Ramandeep Singh, attacked, “tortured”, his pants and underwear pulled off, thrown naked from the waist down into bushes, pronounced dead at the scene at 12.34am.
Morrison chose his words carefully. “I would like to make some comments,” he said. “One would be around there is an obligation on employers to ensure they provide a safe work environment and that includes conducting risk reviews and identifying potential hazards. Security is obviously pretty risky or has inherent risk around it.
“But it would also be ensuring that staff are fit for purpose for that site commensurate with the risk that applies to that site or that environment.
“And I probably would have concerns that the officer involved was 46kg in what could be considered as a probably fairly high-risk-type environment.
“I don’t know the circumstances of the person specifically. But it would probably in my mind have at least raised questions. Are the staff [fit] for purpose for the role they’re doing? An employer should be making sure that staff are not being put at undue risk … Certainly I would have expected consideration for the ability of the security officer to handle the environment they’re working within.”
A series of questions about sending Singh alone that night to Royal Reserve were put to Armourguard chief executive Shane O’Halloran. He did not answer any of the specific queries, but responded with the generalised comment, “Yes, we conducted our own inquiry into Mr Singh’s death. As a result, we have made changes to our procedures, protocols and supervision of staff, to help ensure our people can stay safe as they go about their work – day and night.”
Mentally unfit
A date for the coronial investigation has yet to be set. It’s on hold, pending the outcome of the criminal proceedings: the courts are yet to decide on the fate of the second man involved in the killing of Ramandeep Singh. He was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. The courts are also yet to determine the matter of permanent name suppression. He made a two-day appearance at the High Court of Auckland in April. He kept busy playing with a soft blue toy in the dock and failing to solve a Rubik’s cube.
The court proceeding was termed an involvement hearing, a fairly recently coined term set under the Criminal Procedure Mentally Impaired Persons Act, which sets out to determine whether an accused person found not fit to stand trial by reason of insanity was involved in committing the offence. It’s a sensitive kind of operation that recognises his inability to follow the niceties of criminal law.
Police bugged his parents’ house. His father said, “I love my son. They’re making out he’s a tough c--- but he’s not.”
His mother said, “He’s got a heart of gold.”
“A good boy really, isn’t he.”
“Very loveable, babe.”
“Fuck yeah.”
Their son showed his father images on a mobile phone. They were of “a naked dead man in the bush”, his father told police.
Singh’s father wrote in his victim impact report, “His body was returned to us in a coffin, battered, covered in injuries no one should ever endure. He was a quiet and polite boy who would never pick a fight with anybody.”
For the prosecution, McClintock told the court the man had been drinking with Tangira on the night of Singh’s murder. She alleged he kicked and stomped Singh’s head. Defence lawyer James Olsen argued the evidence failed to demonstrate his client physically participated in the assault.
Justice Downs delivered his judgement on May 31. He found the man was involved. “I am satisfied he caused the act [with Tangira] that forms the basis of the murder charge – the killing of Mr Singh by a sustained assault – by physical participation in that assault, including that concentrating upon Mr Singh’s head.”
The next step is a disposition hearing, a synonym for sentence, and he will likely be remanded to a secure mental health facility, such as the Mason Clinic, for up to 10 years.
Ramandeep Singh came to New Zealand in 2018. He was raised in the village of Kotli Shahpur, in Gurdaspur, Punjab. A Givealittle campaign raised $18,898 from 342 donors, many who gave on Christmas Day, 2023. “I kept him,” his mother said, “like a rose.”