Adam Henare was found guilty of reckless driving causing death. Photo / Supplied
For the second time in a week a courtroom echoed with the mournful sobs of a man who’d just discovered his best friend dying in a gutter.
A jury wanted to hear the chilling 111 call again as Daeus Taueki discovered his mate Raynor Cribb had been dragged 84 metres underneath a car where he lay struggling to breathe, dying just minutes after emergency services arrived.
Today, that jury found Adam Henare, 42, guilty of reckless driving causing death after deliberately dragging Cribb, 27, who was stuck underneath his Subaru early one February morning last year. Henare was on the run from police at the time after ditching his electronically monitored ankle bracelet.
How Cribb came to be stuck under Henare’s car was never in contention during the week-long trial. It followed an altercation between Cribb, his two friends and Henare and his friend Alicia Ralston at a quiet reserve on the outskirts of Levin.
Cribb was in the passenger seat of Taueki’s Honda with their friend Angus Nuku-Rauhihi. Henare and Ralston were in Henare’s blue Subaru when the three men said they’d seen Henare rummage through their car and decided to give chase.
The vehicles reached speeds of 160km/h on back roads before coming to an abrupt stop when they both attempted to take a sharp right-hand bend onto Cambridge St just outside Levin.
The Honda swerved to avoid the quick-braking Subaru and, at some point during the manoeuvre, Cribb took off his seatbelt, opened his door and fell out of the car and was run over by the Subaru.
Henare then drove a further 80m with Cribb stuck underneath his vehicle. A jury has now decided Henare knew he was there and chose to drive away anyway.
The trial, which spanned all of last week at the High Court in Palmerston North, focused on what Henare’s lawyer, Phil Mitchell, summed up as Stop One and Stop Two.
Stop One was the initial near-miss between the two cars at the corner of Cambridge St where Cribb fell from the Honda.
Stop Two refers to 80m up the road where he was dragged and ultimately died.
Henare’s case hinged on the assertion that he got out of his car at Stop One ready to fight the three young men, before they drove back up the road. He got back into his car to find it driving strangely and he thought he’d buckled the front left wheel.
When he got out of the car at Stop Two he discovered Cribb, stuck just behind the front passenger wheel. It’s then, he says, the three men confronted him after having driven back up the road to try and find their friend.
Henare said the boys left to find a car jack and while they were gone he slowly manoeuvred his car off Cribb, who was seriously injured, with the help of his passenger, before leaving him in a gutter on the side of the road.
However, the boys said this whole interaction occurred at Stop One where all the occupants of both cars came to the horrifying revelation that Cribb was stuck under Henare’s car. They say they left from the corner to find a jack and came back some 10 minutes later to find the car gone and Cribb barely breathing up the road.
In his closing submissions yesterday, Mitchell said that it was understandable for Cribb’s friends to give unreliable evidence given their state of intoxication, panic and shock at seeing their friend nearly dead and stuck underneath a car.
“A part of the human condition is to mistakenly remember where you’ve put something,” Mitchell said before noting how easy it was to forget where you’ve put your car keys, or parked your car.
“You can ‘know’ something, and be completely mistaken,” he said.
“When you add in heavy intoxication and being incredibly emotional … the chance of confusion increases.”
He attacked Taueki’s reliability and said that he gave three different statements to police, including one where he denied his friend Angus Nuku-Rauhihi was present during the incident when he was.
“His lies are littered like confetti at a wedding,” he said.
Mitchell said a key component of the reckless driving charge was causation, which meant the Crown needed to prove that it was being dragged 84m that killed Cribb.
Mitchell said Cribb suffered the fatal injuries after falling from his own car and being unintentionally run over by Henare - not by being dragged down the road stuck under a Subaru that was 13.5cm off the ground.
“The critical internal injuries that lead to his death occurred in that initial leap and being run over at the corner,” he said.
Crown prosecutor Guy Carter said the whole trial boiled down to only a few minutes.
Carter said in those minutes Henare found the young man underneath his car and chose to drive away anyway.
“He wanted to leave the scene. Not because he’s afraid of Daeus Taueki and Angus Rauhihi … but because he didn’t want to get caught by police - he was on the run,” he told the jury.
Carter asked the jury to imagine how they would react after a car crash and suggested that any normal person would get out and check the damage.
“He’s tried to make you doubt your common sense. He’s tried to say he drove 84m up the road without ever checking it for damage after the accident,” Carter said.
“Get real, members of the jury, that’s not what happened.
“That story makes no sense. That’s not how people behave.”
Carter said that CCTV footage from the nearby Mainfreight building proved that Cribb’s friends had driven away from the corner looking for him after he’d fallen from the car, before coming back to the corner.
“Every single witness identifies both vehicles being parked together at the corner,” he said.
“CCTV can’t lie ladies and gentlemen, and what it does is catch the defendant in his one.”
However, it was a chilling phone call to 111 by Taueki when he found his mate 84m up the road covered in blood and struggling to breathe that Carter said was imperative to the trial.
“You’ve met Daeus Taueki, he’s not an Oscar-winning actor. You could not make up the shock in his voice,” Carter said.
Carter said Taueki had no reason to lie because it didn’t benefit him and he would have had to come up with it on the spot while he was watching his best friend die in a gutter.
It was this CCTV footage and the 111 call that the jury requested to view again just before 4pm yesterday when the call was played again in open court.
That jury of six men and six women used their own watches to time how long the 111 call lasted before delivering their verdict at 12.15pm today.
Henare will be sentenced in December.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.
OPINION: New Zealander reflects on delivering speech at St James' Palace.