Connor Boyd death: Both defendants accused of 18-year-old’s manslaughter testify

A young couple with name suppression are on trial for manslaughter in the High Court at Auckland. The duo, both now 20, are accused of having caused the death of 18-year-old Connor Boyd. Photo / Dean Purcell

In the moments before 18-year-old Connor Boyd was fatally flung from the side of a moving SUV on central Auckland’s busy Customs St, he had been threatening passengers and throwing punches through an open window, two manslaughter defendants insisted today as they took turns in the witness box proclaiming their innocence.

“I was screaming, ‘Let go, let go!’ and ‘Stop holding!’” the female defendant testified, suggesting Boyd was at that point clinging to the vehicle of his own free will. “I never touched Connor when the vehicle was moving.”

But CCTV cameras tell a different story, prosecutors responded as they spent hours methodically taking the co-defendants through a frame-by-frame analysis of the zoomed-in, grainy footage.

“What we can see in the footage is you putting your arm out and holding Mr Boyd from behind ... after [your boyfriend] had done the same,” Crown prosecutor Claire Paterson suggested, repeating the allegation that Boyd had been dragged to his death.

The two co-defendants - a then-couple who were also 18 on the morning of the April 24, 2022, incident - both have name suppression. They were the final witnesses in the trial, which has been ongoing in the High Court at Auckland since last week.

Closing arguments are expected to take place tomorrow.

The two had considered Boyd a friend but had a run-in with him earlier that night at downtown nightclub Saturdays. The male defendant had earlier punched Boyd. The female defendant was seen on CCTV pushing him into a large planter box outside the nightclub before kicking and slapping him.

Footage showed that Boyd didn’t retaliate earlier in the night when the female defendant attacked him. But the defendants both said he had threatened during the confrontation to shoot up their Ponsonby flat and had said another friend of theirs deserved a bullet to the head.

All three had made up quickly thereafter, the defendants testified. But then Boyd walked up to their SUV as the couple were leaving the nightclub with friends and a fresh argument broke out.

Testifying first, the male defendant admitted he had grabbed Boyd by the shirt during the final argument and started to drive off. But he said he let go while slowing down to turn a corner onto Customs St. After that, he said, Boyd was on the offensive - clinging to the SUV’s running board of his own volition as he threw punches at him through the window.

“I was scared that if I stopped he was going to do something because he was furious that I’d grabbed him,” the male defendant testified.

In roughly five seconds of footage that was played over and over, jurors saw Boyd struggling to run beside the vehicle then standing on the sideboard before tumbling away, his limp body coming to a rest near the intersection of Customs St East and Commerce St around 2.35am. The SUV had run over his head as he was flung from the vehicle, causing unsurvivable injuries.

During cross-examination today, the male defendant agreed with the prosecutor that, in hindsight, it might have been a better option just to roll up the window. He also agreed that, given the way he was driving, Boyd didn’t have any safe option for getting out of the situation.

During those five seconds, the defendant said, he believes Boyd was able to throw about four punches at him as he gripped the steering wheel with both arms and attempted to lean away from him.

“He’s clearly got his legs on the running board and his arms are fully extended. I suggest it would be impossible for him to punch you in that position,” Paterson told the defendant, who disagreed.

“I believe he was hitting me,” the defendant insisted.

If Boyd was punching at all, Paterson suggested, it was only in an effort to stop the vehicle because that was the only way he could get down safely from the running board. The defendant agreed that stopping would have been the only safe option, but he disagreed about the victim’s motivation.

“I was scared if I stopped at that point it would intensify,” he said of Boyd’s anger at him.

Paterson replied: “It seems pretty far-fetched, don’t you think, given the position of power you were in in the car?”

“That’s how I felt,” he said.

Connor Boyd, 18, died in April 2022 after he was run over in central Auckland. Two other teens have been charged with manslaughter.

The defendant said he hadn’t been fearful of Boyd a minute before the incident occurred. But during that final argument as Boyd stood outside the SUV, he said he started to feel fear after Boyd said: “You better watch out, I know where you live.”

During that same argument, the female defendant, sitting in the back seat of the SUV behind her boyfriend, had shoved Boyd through the open window and slapped him, she acknowledged. She had consumed a bottle-and-a-half of rosé prior to showing up at the nightclub that night and was quite intoxicated, she said.

“Control your missus,” she recalled Boyd telling her boyfriend after she lashed out, with her boyfriend grabbing Boyd’s shirt and driving off immediately after.

She screamed at her boyfriend to let go, and then when he did she screamed at Boyd to let go, she testified. Meanwhile, she said, Boyd was yelling threats and punching through the window.

“I was freaking out because [the co-defendant] is holding onto Connor and it’s clearly not going to end well,” she said, adamantly denying the prosecution’s repeated suggestions that she could also be seen grabbing onto Boyd in the footage.

After Boyd fell and she felt the bump underneath the vehicle, she said she didn’t look back because she was in shock but borrowed another passenger’s phone and called 111.

“We were just leaving Saturdays and some dude tried to f*** up my boyfriend,” she said in the call, which was played for jurors. “He wouldn’t let go. He literally went underneath the car. He was so drunk.”

Paterson suggested the defendant didn’t call police until they had returned to their apartment and that she was purposely misleading to the operator in an attempt to deflect blame from her boyfriend and herself. The defendant denied both suggestions.

The prosecutor also noted that in a police interview later that morning, the female defendant said that Boyd had been the person to grab her boyfriend’s T-shirt rather than the other way around.

“That’s how I remember that night,” she insisted again today, acknowledging that the CCTV footage played in court doesn’t match her recollection but suggesting the footage might be “glitchy”.

Regardless, she said, she hadn’t slept in nearly 24 hours before giving the interview and wasn’t in a proper state of mind to immediately give an accurate account.

“This is probably the most traumatic thing that’s happened in my life,” she explained of that morning. “I’m freaking out.”

In addition to the manslaughter charge, the female defendant was charged with multiple counts of assault from earlier that night and earlier in the week at the same nightclub. In addition to the earlier attack on Boyd, she had targeted a fellow 18-year-old woman whom the defendant said she had long disliked.

Three days before Boyd’s death, the female defendant had thrown a drink on the other woman at the nightclub, calling her a “homewrecker” before the two exchanged blows. When she saw the same woman at the nightclub on the night of Boyd’s death, she had walked up from behind the victim and pulled her to the ground by her hair. Later, as the victim was sitting outside the club on the phone with her mother, the two exchanged words and she kicked the girl in the shoulder, she said.

The defendant admitted to the assaults but denied allegations she had stomped the victim after pulling her by the hair or that she kicked the victim in the head as she sat on the kerb.

The defendant said she lashed out because the other girl had been “emotionally hurting” her and her friends.

“I regret it, because that’s not the way I should have gone about it,” she said of the attacks on the other woman, two of which were caught on CCTV and viewed by jurors. “Looking at that footage, it actually makes me sick, so yes, I get it.”

The trial is set to continue tomorrow before Justice Ian Gault 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.