“Now I’m scared. Police here. It’s Drew,” she would text her sister at 2.38am, adding five minutes later: “OMG he’s screaming. I’m scared. He might come shoot me.”
The witness, who testified via audio-video feed from another area of the courthouse today, wept throughout most of her questioning. Prosecutor Chris Howard often had to ask her the same question multiple times before she would answer, with her eventual response more often than not being that she couldn’t remember.
But the testimony was slowly coaxed along with Howard frequently showing the witness her texts and a signed statement she made to police on the morning of the incident to help refresh her memory.
Lamositele-Brown’s partner said they had gotten up on Christmas morning to open presents before she took their children to spend the day at her sister’s house. The defendant stayed at home, preparing a late Christmas dinner consisting of barbecue and looking after their 2-year-old son.
When she got home that night, she noticed that he had at some point in the day obtained a bottle of Hennessy Cognac that was roughly halfway through it, she said.
“He was drunk,” she said, noting reluctantly after prompting from prosecutors that when he drank “he’d always think I’m cheating”.
“His mood just changed,” she said, explaining that both continued to drink after she returned home. “He just looked grumpy.”
The woman eventually went up to bed and left Lamositele-Brown downstairs to continue drinking alone, but she went back downstairs to tidy up after hearing the rumble of Petau’s Harley-Davidson motorbike arriving at the house around 1am.
“Sorry about this mess,” she recalled telling the man, known as “Pete”, who she had only met once before.
“He just laughed and said you should see his house, it’s worse.”
After returning upstairs she said she recalled her partner calling Petau “uso” - Samoan from “brother” - and laughing. When asked what she heard next, her answer was in a barely audible whisper: “a loud bang”.
She then recalled running downstairs and letting out a loud scream as she saw the guest lying face down in the hallway. She eventually added, after much prompting, that her partner had a small black gun in his hands.
“I tried to take it off of him,” she said.
“My kids!” she recalled saying during the struggle, explaining that the defendant also said, “My kids!”
When prosecutors pointed out she had earlier told police that Lamositele-Brown had pointed the gun at her during the struggle, she said she has no memory of that.
“I was terrified, scared for my life and I thought he was going to shoot me,” she told police in the statement on the morning of the shooting. “I yelled at my girls to run, to go upstairs, but they wouldn’t leave Pete.
“I pushed them and I screamed at them to go up the stairs.”
She acknowledged today that she had been concerned about her daughters, but she insisted she hadn’t been fearful for her own safety despite what the signed police statement might indicate.
Once upstairs, with a mattress pushed up against the wall, she called 111.
“I could hear Andrew swearing in Samoan downstairs and that made me absolutely terrified,” she was quoted as telling police, although she said today she had no memory of that.
She acknowledged that police eventually came to her bedroom window and led her and her children outside.
During his opening address yesterday, Howard noted that during the police standoff a negotiator twice asked Lamositele-Brown what was going on inside.
“What’s really going on is he f***ed with the wrong c***,” the defendant allegedly responded the first time, adding later: “Ask my missus.”
Although called to testify by prosecutors, the woman seemed more at ease and was quicker to answer later in the day when cross-examined by defence lawyer Vivienne Feyen, who put a series of propositions to her.
It had been an otherwise pleasant evening, with no animosity between the couple and no jealousy, the witness agreed.
“Overall, it was a happy Christmas Day, wasn’t it?” Feyen asked and the witness agreed.
She also agreed with Feyen that the text predicting her partner was “going to make troubles” was a reference only to him staying up late and playing his music loud.
As for Lamositele-Brown’s jealousy when drinking, Feyen suggested it was “ancient history” from the beginning of their relationship and that they now had “a stable family life”. The woman agreed.
Her partner looked happy to see Petau when he arrived, she said - not grumpy, as she had earlier described his mood.
“Did you have any concerns about Pete being with Andrew at all?” Feyen asked.
“No,” the partner said.
Nothing Petau said during their short interaction would have led to concerns about cheating, she agreed, repeating that she barely knew the man.
The woman is expected to continue testifying when the trial resumes tomorrow 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.
