Murder trial proceeds with witness evidence

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

I didn’t put it down to a gunshot; I thought a bomb had gone off. It went bang and lit up the whole inside of the car.”

A Childers Road resident recalled for a High Court jury this week shots she saw being fired by someone in a utility vehicle on Titoki Street, the night Maraea Smith died there after being hit by a bullet.

Woken by yelling and arguing between a man and woman, the resident said she got out of bed and stood at her window being “a nosy neighbour”.

She was immediately drawn to a ute, of which she had a clear view as it sat idling at the end of Titoki Street as if it were about to turn left into Childers Road. That’s where the “screaming and carrying on” was coming from, the woman said.

“I could hear a lot of arguing and as I stood there, I heard a bang. It wasn’t the bang that threw me off, it was the light inside the vehicle. I thought they were going to blow up.

“It was a split second — maybe three, five, but not long after (the first bang), it went off again and lit the whole cab up again,” the woman said.

Smoke poured out of the vehicle — either a window was down or the door might have been open, she said.

She feared the vehicle was about to blow up.

Her husband, however, recognised someone was shooting a firearm and phoned police.

The couple gave evidence on day four of a High Court trial that started in Gisborne on Monday for murder accused George Hallet Walker, 36, and his partner Mercedies Grace, 31.

The Crown alleges the vehicle the witnesses saw was Walker’s distinctive grey canopy-back Nissan Nivara ute and that Walker, a Mongrel Mob member, fired two .303 calibre shots from outside it on Titoki Street at about 9.55pm on March 25, last year. Those shots, prosecutors say, were intended for rival Black Power members. One was believed to have hit the ground about 50 metres away, though the bullet was never recovered; the other fatally wounded Ms Smith — an innocent bystander about 85 metres away, who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Grace was allegedly the driver. She has been charged as a party to the murder.

The Crown alleges the shooting was further retaliation for an attack on a vehicle at a Mongrel Mob house in the street earlier that night by a group of people believed to have been Black Power prospects. Witnesses have said Grace was involved in that incident and suffered a wound to her hand.

It’s an agreed fact in the trial that after the vehicle was damaged, Walker’s ute was used to ram the Black Power group’s car into a fence at Maraea’s sister’s house, which wasn’t connected in any way to the dispute.

Arriving there to celebrate her 36th birthday and seeing the car stuck in the fence, Maraea and one of her sisters made the fateful decision to go in search of the Black Power members. They were on the footpath trying to persuade them to remove the car when the first shot was fired. They were running for home when Maraea was hit by the second bullet.

The witness said she couldn’t identify who was in the vehicle but each time the cab lit up with the explosive light, she could clearly see two silhouettes — the one in the back seat was larger than the other.

After the shots were fired, the ute “just sat there for a bit, it didn’t speed off — it’s like they were thinking about something”. It rocked back and forward a couple of times then “took off” towards the Lytton Road roundabout.

The jury has been told Walker and Grace were living in a cabin at a property just a few doors down from that roundabout.

In cross-examination, Walker’s counsel Shane Cassidy put it to the woman that what she told police about the colour of the light in a statement taken 90 minutes after the incident was different from her account in court. The woman said regardless of what colour it was, it was an intense light — not a light you’d get from turning on an interior car light or anything like that.

Mr Cassidy also put it to the woman she told police the succession of light flashes was immediate — so quicker than what she described in court.

He wanted her to accept that her description of the incident to police that night would have been more reliable than it was now. However, the woman said she suffers from anxiety and “everything went into panic mode” after what she had seen that night.

She was adamant she could still now accurately recall what happened.

“It’s not often you see something like that — the impression is burnt in my head. It’s not something where you go, ‘they stole a packet of chips — oh well!’ There was meaning to this. You don’t forget things like that, you hold on to that and you try to do the good out of the facts that you know you can do good with, and that’s what I’m here today to do.”

Regardless of the time that had passed, “When you know someone has been hurt it’s not something you forget — it’s not a packet of chips,” she said.

The woman’s husband, under cross-examination by Mr Cassidy, reiterated his earlier certainty to police that the ute he saw that night was a Toyota Hilux with a shallow, flat deck.

Assistant counsel for Grace, Holly Tunstall put it to the witness that the arguing she heard didn’t come from the ute but from others in the street including Maraea’s sister who said she had been “going off” or “flipping out” at the Black Power members about their car being stuck in her fence. The witness said she didn’t see anyone else near the ute so she believed the arguing was coming from it.

No firearm has been found in relation to the shooting.

Defence counsel have put to various previous witnesses there was a possibility the shots were fired from somewhere else in the street.