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While his infant son was in hospital with “profound and permanent” brain damage that would result in his death, Papatoetoe resident Tipene James Te Ahuru admitted to a police detective that he had struggled with anger issues his whole life and “the evidence is stacked against me like a motherf***er”.
“The one thing I never wanted to be was an abuser like him,” he said of his own father, who he described as the “s***tiest f***ing dad you could ever hope for”. “And now it’s my son sitting in the hospital fighting for his f***ing life and I’m just like, ‘F***, I am my dad’.”
The emotional revelation was played for jurors today in Te Ahuru’s ongoing murder trial in the High Court at Auckland.
Te Ahuru, 32, has pleaded not guilty to the charge, with his lawyers suggesting at the outset of the trial this week that their client didn’t have the intention or foresight to have murdered 3-month-old Amaziah Te Ahuru in September 2022. Jurors will have to decide if “this was all just an accident”, they said.
But the Crown noted the child had suffered extensive injuries, including a brain bleed that resulted in his death after 11 days on life support at Starship children’s hospital. The defendant, they said, changed his story repeatedly about what had happened.
Jurors over the past two days have watched three recorded police interviews with the defendant and reviewed a written statement he initially gave police.
In the first recorded interview, two days after his son was hospitalised, Te Ahuru told Detective Brett Roberts that he had agreed to talk because he needed to amend his written statement to reveal he had dropped the infant.
His partner had gone to a laundromat that day and he was burping the child, trying to put him down for a nap, he said. The child kept crying louder and the defendant was getting frustrated, he admitted. But the injuries only happened, he told the detective, because the child fell after giving a “little jolt” as the father was turning to look for a dummy. Te Ahuru said he grabbed for his son’s leg but instead accidentally pushed him in mid-air, which possibly “caused more velocity”.
Te Ahuru said he felt a thud as the child hit the ground, at which point his son went stiff and was unresponsive. In a panic, he tried putting the child under a cold shower then he googled how to do CPR, he said, adding that he called his partner after about 10 minutes. An ambulance was called only after his partner rushed home.
“I was scared,” he repeated four times when asked why he initially omitted the drop in his written statement. “I don’t get scared of anything. I’m not scared of anyone, but this is a whole different ball game.
Tipene Te Ahuru appears in the High Court at Auckland at the outset of his murder trial. He is accused of having killed his infant son in September 2022. Photo / Jason Oxenham
“The fact that someone can judge me on the fact that I might have abused my son... I was brought up by an abusive father so the fact that I don’t wanna become like he was, so it just scared me. And my whole life my family has drilled into us, ‘Don’t trust Oranga Tamariki and the police around your kids because they’ll take then away.’ That’s what I was told, so that’s always been the fear in the back of my mind and now that I’ve got my own kid and it’s real, it just shut me down.”
But he decided to amend his statement, he said, after talking with his partner and because “the guilt just got too much”.
It still didn’t add up, Detective Roberts said two days later during a follow-up interview. He outlined an extensive list of injuries, which a doctor had already at that early stage described as “classic findings of severe abusive head trauma”. Such trauma is rarely accidental, the detective told Te Ahuru.
“He may well live but he will be profoundly and permanently brain-damaged with no prospect for a normal life,” he said, asking Te Ahuru to explain the discrepancy.
“I can’t explain any of it,” the defendant responded, adding later: “His professional thing will always contradict mine so I can only say my truth.”
At the detective’s request, Te Ahuru went through the sequence of events again and again, acknowledging at one point he had been holding the baby in an unsafe manner. He said he had smoked cannabis that morning, but when challenged on that detail by the detective he acknowledged it was right before his partner left to do the laundry.
“Just calm down, man, that’s enough!” he recalled shouting at the baby as his frustration mounted over the crying. “That’s enough, son. I don’t know what you want me to do, I don’t know what to do. You’re just making it worse by crying louder and louder.”
His partner had told police Te Ahuru would usually “take his anger out on the house” when angry, punching walls, slamming doors and throwing items. She described arguments in which he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her.
“I’ve done that quite a few times,” Te Ahuru conceded, but added: “It’s never like f***ing grabbing her by the throat and pinning her up against the wall, like, ‘Shut your f***ing mouth’.
“I know I got anger management issues.”
The detective again pointed to the inconsistency with the medical opinion.
“F***, oh I could cry but f***ing hell,” Te Ahuru responded. “I’ve got so much things going through my head like, ‘Did I squeeze you too hard?’ Do you know what I mean? ‘Did I not realise how frustrated I was and squeezed you like, you know, just too [much]?’ F*** knows, brother.
“So ... do you take me away from my family ... lock me up, what is it?”
The detective replied: “We want to find the truth of what happened. What you’re saying doesn’t line up, so we want the truth from you.”
Te Ahuru acknowledged the evidence was stacked against him. The two sat in silence for a protracted period.
“Look, you clearly care about your son but you’ve admitted that you get frustrated,” the detective later noted.
“Yeah, I got anger issues but I don’t take that shit out on my family,” Te Ahuru responded.
“Tell me about those anger issues,” Roberts requested.
“I was never taught how to be a father, you know what I mean?” the defendant said. “The only person that ever showed me love was my mother. It’s not an excuse – it’s actually a real problem.”
He said his abusive childhood “f***ed me up big time”.
“This was the longest relationship I’ve ever had, man, been together nearly two years. Couldn’t even hold down a decent relationship before that because I was just too angry. Not to the point of beating them but just the anger would freak them out to the point [they think], ‘I’ve got to get out of here because he might beat me up,’ you know?”
Shortly after the second interview ended, Te Ahuru was charged with wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. But he was still talkative and during the ride to another police station where he was to be processed he admitted: “I think I shook him and threw him on the bed.” It prompted the third and final interview later that evening.
Picking up a hard plastic doll, he mimicked shaking the baby before throwing the doll underarm onto the interview room table like a rugby ball – resulting in a loud thud. He estimated he shook the baby for about three seconds and the throw “wasn’t like a full force”, but afterwards he noticed the child’s eyes were closed and his veins were “kind of like popping out of his head”.
“He was like, ‘arh, arh,’ like almost, yeah, almost gasping,” the defendant recalled.
The detective took a break, leaving Te Ahuru alone in the room.
“I’m so sorry, my son,” Te Ahuru could be heard whispering to himself – putting his hands in a praying motion before hunching over and starting to weep. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The trial is set to continue tomorrow before Justice Jane Anderson and the jury.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
