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Bernadette Rawiri was jailed for six years and two months for her role in a kidnapping.
Kayla Pawa was tortured for 24 days to obtain her partner’s cryptocurrency password.
Judge Brooke Gibson emphasised the severity of the crime and Rawiri’s involvement from the start.
Warning: This includes descriptions of extreme violence
A woman with ties to the Nomads and Crips has been jailed after admitting she helped facilitate what a judge has described as “one of the worst cases of kidnappings seen in Auckland in recent years”.
After being taken from the bedroom of her Birkenhead home by a group of armed, masked intruders in the middle of the night in June 2023, victim Kayla Pawa was driven to the Glen Eden home of defendant Bernadette Rawiri.
The purpose of the torture, Judge Brooke Gibson said last week as he ordered Rawiri to serve a sentence of six years and two months imprisonment, was to break the victim’s will so she would give up the password to her then-partner’s cryptocurrency stash.
Kidnap victim Kayla Pawa was kept captive and tortured for 24 days, the court heard.
Pawa repeatedly insisted she didn’t know the password and had no way of obtaining the money but those involved in her abduction, including Rawiri, didn’t believe her.
“It’s clear you were involved right from the start,” the judge told Rawiri, who stood in the Auckland District Court dock wearing all black, with her head lowered and her hands in her pocket. “You were clearly present when she was interrogated in your home ...
“You may well hang your head in shame, because it is a very shameful event.”
Both faced up to 14 years' imprisonment for the kidnapping charge. They also both sported extensive facial tattoos and arrived at court with reports describing deprived childhoods. Defence lawyer Hannah Johnson described an upbringing for Rawiri in which “violence became a normal factor in her life”.
Bernadette Rawiri, photographed in 2020, five years before she was sentenced for participating in the 24-day kidnapping of a woman who was repeatedly tortured in an attempt to get her partner's cryptocurrency password.
But she had done her best while incarcerated this most recent time to engage in programmes aimed at rehabilitation, including vocational training, the lawyer said, pointing to family members seated in the courtroom gallery to support her.
“There are clear future rehabilitative prospects,” she said.
Meat cleaver, blowtorch
Judge Gibson acknowledged that Rawiri’s part in the kidnapping was not as extensive as her cousin’s, but he pointed to the many pieces of evidence outlined in the agreed summary of facts showing that Rawiri remained involved throughout Pawa’s 24 days of captivity.
Pawa was abducted about 10.30pm on June 12, 2023.
At 10.38pm, Rawiri texted her cousin: “Blindfold her k i’m on my way home nw.” At 10.55pm, Rawiri told Harris she had made it home and at 11.04pm she instructed him on how to bring the victim inside her home unnoticed.
Carlos Harris was in the Waitākere District Court in 2023, charged with unlawfully taking away a woman without her consent with intent to cause her to be confined. Photo / Michael Craig
“Her kidnappers tied her to a chair with a shower curtain or sheet laid on the ground,” documents state. “There were a large number of people, both males and females, present. They told Ms Pawa to give back their money.”
Rawiri updated Harris by way of text hours later, at 2.40am: “She keeps saying she dnt know.”
The victim was given a deadline of 7am to give the captors access to the cryptocurrency before she would have to choose a finger to be cut off.
By 6.37am, Rawiri had left her home to drop someone off when Harris texted her a request: “Can u get some plyers please ... something that will cut a finger off?”
The amputation threat was not carried out in the end, but one woman did hit her in the ribs with a baseball bat while multiple men used a hammer on her hands, authorities outlined in court documents. Pawa tried at one point to run from the West Auckland home but was captured. If she tried it again, she was warned, they would kill her.
Three days later, she was moved to Harris' home in Glen Eden, where she believes she was held for about two weeks. For most of that time, she was locked inside what was described as an “extremely cold” bathroom.
The threats and torture continued.
“Which side do you want me to take?” one man asked as he held a meat cleaver to her shoulder, after beating her unconscious then returning hours later with the knife and threats of amputating an entire limb.
Kidnap victim Kayla Pawa.
On another occasion described by the victim, two people held her down while a third person lit a blowtorch, waving it over her legs and face and threatening to “burn her eyeballs out”. The threat wasn’t carried out but the flame was close enough to singe her hair and eyebrows, she later recounted.
The victim was eventually shoved in the boot of a vehicle – warned beforehand that if she screamed she would be shot – and driven to an abandoned house in a rural area of Kohukohu, in the Far North.
“While there, she was told that one of the males had dug a hole for her grave,” court documents state. “Ms Pawa was made to help with the digging.”
‘Never met her’
By that point, police had finally been alerted that she was missing. Her partner had not mentioned the kidnapping until June 27, just over two weeks after he watched the kidnappers’ convoy speed off from his home.
Once on the case, investigators made some rapid strides in tracking her down thanks to what was believed to be a major mistake by her captors – having her sign in on a laptop. After obtaining her Google account information, police tracked her IP address to Rawiri’s home. They also quickly realised Harris’ home was a location of interest.
Dual search warrants were executed at both homes around 3am on July 4, but Pawa had long since been removed.
Harris wasn’t home when police arrived at his home but Rawiri was at her house. She texted her cousin repeatedly after police left, indicating it was extremely urgent that they speak.
A short time later, after they spoke on the phone, Harris texted another man instructing him to “get rid of lapy”.
Police released this photo of Carlos Harris while searching for him before his kidnapping arrest. Photo / Police
“Cuz where the phone and hard drives?” he then texted Rawiri.
Rawiri replied: “Idnt Kno cuz didnt u take it”.
She added a short time later: “Cos I’m TRIPPING.”
The next day, Rawiri went to Henderson Police Station and made a formal written statement.
“Ms Rawiri stated that she had not heard anything about a missing person named Kayla Pawa,” court documents state. “She was also shown a photograph of Ms Pawa, and stated she had never seen this person before.”
By that time, Pawa had been moved to a fourth location – from the Far North address to a driveway in Whangārei, where she was being kept in the boot of a Volkswagen. She was bound by cable ties, had a bandana around her mouth and was prevented from escaping by a car alarm that was supposed to go off if the boot opened.
On July 6, she realised the alarm appeared to be off and jumped out of the boot, running until she was able to flag down a passing ambulance. She still had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles during a medical check a short time later, but her injuries weren’t life-threatening.
‘Too gruesome’
After pleading guilty last year, Rawiri told authorities she wasn’t aware that the victim had continued to be held captive after she was removed from Rawiri’s home.
“But I very much doubt that,” Judge Gibson noted before calculating her sentence.
“You said you couldn’t read the summary of facts and feared it too gruesome. Well, it is.”
Judge Gibson accepted the starting point of eight and a half years for the kidnapping charge suggested by Crown prosecutor Taniela-Afu Veikune – four years more than had been requested by the defence.
He then added six months for the burglary at a commercial property that Rawiri committed in September 2023, during which a digger and trailer vanished and were never recovered. The judge marvelled that “somehow you were allowed bail” for the kidnapping charge that had occurred just two months before the burglary.
Auckland resident Bernadette Rawiri has been sentenced for participating in the 24-day kidnapping of a woman who was repeatedly tortured in an attempt to get her partner's cryptocurrency password.
An additional two months were added for having offended on bail and two more months were added to account for Rawiri’s extensive criminal history.
The judge noted she had 53 prior convictions between 2008 and 2022, mostly for dishonesty offences like shoplifting but also for a 2021 assault and firearms offence along with numerous compliance breaches. Twenty-two of the offences were committed while on bail.
“Quite rightly”, he said, probation assessed her as being at high risk of reoffending.
That figure was then reduced by 20% to account for her guilty pleas, 5% for remorse that included a letter of apology and 10% for her deprived childhood, growing up in a household marred by violence in which her father was a Black Power member.
Judge Gibson also ordered that Rawiri serve at least half of the six years and two months before she can apply for parole.
She had asked to have no minimum term of imprisonment imposed, but the judge said that allowing her release after serving one-third of the sentence – the standard time at which inmates can start applying for parole – would not adequately denounce the violence that was involved in the kidnapping or protect the community.
Judge Gibson advised Rawiri to find a different friend set when eventually released if she was serious about turning her life around. But he also expressed scepticism that was actually the case.
“I believe you are likely to continue offending after your release,” he said before sending her away.
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.
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