A person has died following an incident on the South Western Motorway about 3.20am. Photo / Hayden Woodward
An Auckland man accused of the fatal Boxing Day kidnapping of his long-time partner told jurors today that he had twice tried to kick her out of his car when it was stationary.
He was shocked, he said, when she belligerently and drunkenly opened the door as he was driving her home.
“She did it pretty suddenly, and I think it was to scare me or get my attention,” Jovan Aroha Zachariah Pora said from the witness box today after electing to testify in his trial in the High Court at Auckland.
He is the first witness for the defence in a trial that has been running for two weeks. He has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and “fright-response” manslaughter, which occurs when a victim acts in a manner dangerous to their life out of fear of another person.
Pora, who turns 22 later this week, testified that he slowed down and put on his hazard lights after the first door-opening incident, after a Christmas night and early Boxing Day morning in 2022 that had been filled with a toxic combination of relationship drama and drinking.
At that point, he said, girlfriend Katelyn Rua-Tuhou was still talking but it was more to herself than arguing with him.
“I had switched off by that point,” he said. “I just wasn’t going to get drawn into any arguments. I was tired. Katelyn was clearly drunk. My whole goal and mission was to get her home ...”
Rua-Tuhou would die just a short time later, after Pora had entered the Southern Motorway. CCTV played for jurors earlier in the trial showed the door opening again. Pora said he could not remember where the car was when that happened.
“I remember entering the motorway, then driving straight – I was just trying to focus,” he said. “Then I heard some wind suddenly out of nowhere. It was whistling past the car.
“I seen the car door open and I seen Katelyn leaning against that door. I felt like Katelyn was about to fall out of the car. I just reached. I reached over, grabbed her, pulled her upright.”
But when he turned his eyes back to the road, he realised he had veered out of his lane and tried to correct.
“That’s when I began to lose control of the car. When we began to spin, the car doors go open again. I reach to grab the back of her shirt or bra, but she passed from my grip. I just remember hitting the barrier and her being gone from my grip.
“I just remember the car continuing to spin and me being alone in the car.”
Kidnap accused Jovan Pora returns to Manukau District Court in 2022 after being charged with manslaughter in addition to an earlier charge of kidnapping. Photo / Dean Purcell
When he got out of the car, he found Rua-Tuhou bleeding and unresponsive on the motorway. First responders have testified that she died at the scene.
At the outset of the trial last month, Crown prosecutor Henry Benson-Pope said Rua-Tuhou had voluntarily got into Pora’s car that morning after he arrived at her father’s Manurewa home. But it was clear she did not want to leave with him as he drove off, he suggested.
“He would not stop the vehicle,” Benson-Pope said. “He would not let her out.”
Defence lawyer Vivienne Feyen told jurors today during her opening address that Pora had no intention that morning of taking anyone against their will. He had gone to pick up his girlfriend of three years because a family member of hers had asked him to take her home.
“She wasn’t dragged outside by Jovan Pora,” Feyen said. “As far as Jovan knew and believed, she was in his car because she wanted to go home.”
She said the incident was not the first or even the second time Rua-Tuhou had tried to jump out of a moving car.
“When Katelyn drank, she became a different person,” Feyen said. “When Katelyn drank her actions were violent, volatile and unpredictable.”
The big issue for jurors to decide, she predicted, would be whether she opened the car door out of “self-preservation or intoxication”.
During cross-examination of Pora today, prosecutors suggested the relationship was far less stable than the defendant let on. Benson-Pope pointed repeatedly to Facebook Messenger communications from July 2022, five months before the motorway incident, in which Rua-Tuhou described a brutal beating by Pora.
“Jovan came home last night drunk and full-on bashed me all night,” she wrote at the time. “I was screaming for him to stop ... I really thought he was going to kill me.”
In another message exchange just weeks before Rua-Tuhou’s death, Pora threatened: “I’m handing your nudes out everywhere too, you snake.”
“Do what you need to do to feel better,” she responded, to which he replied: “I mean it. Don’t come here because I’m not going to work today and it won’t end well for you.”
Pora said he was “blackout” drunk on the night of the July beating and didn’t remember any of it but acknowledged it must have happened. But he had never been violent with Rua-Tuhou since and he didn’t believe she feared him, he insisted.
In pointed questioning, Benson-Pope repeatedly suggested that Pora was suffering selective amnesia, particularly regarding moments that would have made him look violent in front of the jury. He repeatedly denied it.
The prosecutor reminded Pora that other witnesses said Rua-Tuhou had been screaming, “Help me! Help me!” to her family before he drove off on Boxing Day morning and that one witness said he flashed a knife at them. Pora denied both suggestions.
“Why wouldn’t you just let her stay with her family when they were trying to get her out of the car?” Benson-Pope asked.
“Because I didn’t feel like they had the best interests for her,” Pora responded.
The prosecutor also suggested it didn’t make sense that Pora’s response to his partner opening the car door the first time was to then drive onto a 100km/h motorway instead of stopping to let her out.
“You weren’t worried about her safety,” he said. “You just didn’t want her to get out of the vehicle. You just kept driving onto that motorway because you’d kidnapped Katelyn, hadn’t you?”
Pora denied it. He said he didn’t think her safety was an issue as he entered the motorway.
“I just wanted to get home.”
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.
