A homicide investigation has been launched after a man was found dead at a Flat Bush address from which gunshots had earlier been heard. Video / Hayden Woodward
Hells Angels member Andrew Lamositele-Brown had just dropped off his partner and four children at a relative’s house on Christmas Day two years ago when he went to a mystery house and was given three items.
The items were a bottle of Hennessy Cognac as a Christmas gift, a handgun that the unidentified owner “wanted to get rid of quick” and a purse filled with ammunition.
All three items would play a role in the homicide just hours later of gang associate Petau Petau inside the murder defendant’s Flat Bush home - resulting in a tense seven-hour police standoff.
Standing in the witness box today, Lamositele-Brown pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun and demonstrated how he was holding the newly acquired pistol sideways, “flossing” it “gangster style” as he showed it off to Petau over drinks during a 1am visit as that Christmas Day in 2021 transitioned into Boxing Day.
“He was excited and just jumped up like he wanted to have a look and tried to grab it,” the defendant testified. “I reacted to his jumping up. I went back and it just went off.
Lamositele-Brown, 40, has said the shooting was accidental. The defendant, who also goes by the name Andrew Tovia Fepuleai, appeared unemotional as he initially described the shooting to jurors but began to sniffle after he was asked by defence lawyer Vivienne Feyen to look at a photo of the victim facedown in the hallway of the defendant’s home.
Prosecutors, who finished presenting evidence just prior to the defendant’s testimony, have painted a much different picture of what occurred that morning - one involving drunken rage and possibly jealousy.
He had too much to drink that day and it was having an effect on his mood, lawyer Chris Howard suggested at the outset of the trial two weeks ago. When asked by police during the standoff what had happened, he yelled back: “What’s really going on is he f***ed with the wrong c***.”
Another time he answered: “Ask my missus.”
His wife and children at that time were barricaded in an upstairs bedroom. Police eventually used a ladder to help the defendant’s partner and children escape through a bedroom window.
In his own recollection of events, Lamositele-Brown said everyone was jovial and in the holiday spirit that night - himself and Petau included. He estimated having consumed about six bottles of a pre-mixed vodka drink and five glasses of “Henny and Coke” that he had mixed on his own.
“I was intoxicated but I wasn’t drunk,” he said.
Andrew Lamositele-Brown, otherwise known as Andrew Tovia Fepuleai, is on trial in the High Court at Auckland, accused of murdering fellow Hells Angels member Petau Petau on Boxing Day 2021. Photo / Michael Craig
He invited Petau over after the associate texted around midnight to wish him a merry Christmas, he said, describing his victim as a “mate from the club” whom he had met about six months earlier - shortly after moving from Australia and joining the South Auckland chapter of the Hells Angels.
After serving Petau a drink at the kitchen table, they asked each other how their Christmas Day had gone and he mentioned the newly acquired gun he had gotten on the cheap, he said. Petau wanted to see the firearm so he retrieved it from a kitchen cabinet, he said.
Lamositele-Brown refused while testifying today to identify the man he had received the gun from or even where he lived, and he was vague about his reason for going there other than to say he went that way “to drop off some stuff”.
Early the next morning, the defendant said both he and the victim were “buzzing out” about how much ammunition had come with the gun when he started playing with it and it accidentally fired.
“I froze. I was in shock,” he said, recounting how Petau stumbled from the kitchen table before collapsing in the hallway.
The next thing he remembered, he said, was his partner running down the stairs.
“She came at me screaming,” he said, explaining that she was trying to grab the gun from him. “I told her to leave it, that it went off.
“I was trying to keep the gun away from her.”
His partner would later tell police that the struggle stopped when Lamositele-Brown pointed the gun at her and that she was “terrified” that he was going to shoot her, but she said she couldn’t remember that while reluctantly testifying at trial.
After his partner and daughters ran upstairs, Lamositele-Brown recalled thinking to himself, “What the f***?” then firing the gun into the wall out of frustration. At that point, he explained, he knew Petau was dead.
“[I was] angry at myself and pissed off at the guy I got the piece off,” he said. “I didn’t know that the piece was loaded. He didn’t tell me anything. I thought all the ammo was in the purse.
He fired the gun a third time out of frustration, he recalled.
“That was the closest thing I had to a best friend,” he said of Petau. “Everything was just a f***ing mess.”
He explained that when he told police “he f***ed with the wrong c***”, he was talking about the “c*** I got the piece off of” who didn’t tell him the gun was loaded.
When he told police to “ask the missus”, it wasn’t intended to convey jealousy but a suggestion they talk to her about his explanation that the gun accidentally fired, he said today.
He was also angry at Petau that morning, he acknowledged, but only after his friend had already died.
“If he didn’t try to grab it, nothing would have happened,” he testified.
“Why did you try to grab it?” he recalled asking the corpse, sitting on the stairs next to the body as the standoff ensued and he contemplated “ending it all”.
“Sorry, uso.”
Lamositele-Brown’s lawyers have not yet finished questioning him. Prosecutors are expected to get a chance at cross-examination sometime tomorrow as the trial continues before Justice Sally Fitzgerald 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.
