Hospital drop-off homicide: Jimel Burns-Wong-Tung found guilty of murdering Rangiwhero Ngaronoa

Tago Kepa Hemopo (left) and Jimel Burns-Wong-Tung appear in the High Court at Auckland in relation to the November 2021 death of Rangiwhero Toia Ngaronoa. Photos / Jason Oxenham

A young mother of three who is a member of one of Auckland’s most prominent Mongrel Mob-affiliated families has been found guilty of murder after jurors agreed that CCTV footage from a suburban cul-de-sac caught her in the act of inflicting fatal stab wounds on a man who was held captive in an SUV.

Jimel Burns-Wong-Tung, 25, was engulfed by an unusually large group of security - five surrounding her in or near the dock, with other security and uniformed police officers keeping watch over the gallery, and others still outside the courtroom - as the verdict was announced this afternoon.

Despite the precautions indicating an expectation for the worst, the courtroom was completely silent after the majority verdict was read save for comments from a couple of relatives who told the defendant they loved her as she was escorted back to her cell to await sentencing.

In another unusual security precaution, her partner and co-defendant, Tago Hemopo, was initially kept out of the courtroom so that his verdicts - for lesser charges of conspiracy to injure and being an accessory after the fact to murder - could be announced separately.

Jurors unanimously found Hemopo guilty of conspiracy to injure but acquitted him of the other charge.

A supporter in red with a large Mongrel Mob tattoo covering his face flashed a gang sign to Hemopo as he was subsequently led out of the courtroom. “F**kers,” another supporter shouted as she stood up and left the courtroom to where an overflow crowd was milling about.

Justice Matthew Muir ordered the pair be returned to the High Court at Auckland in December for sentencing.

Jurors were not told of the defendants’ gang connections during the five-week trial because the killing of 22-year-old Rangiwhero Toia Ngaronoa in November 2021 was never alleged to be gang-related. But the subject of gangs, in general, did bubble to the surface as protocols were altered to accommodate the large numbers of Mongrel Mob members and supporters who made the courthouse their second home over the past month as they faithfully observed each day of the trial.

Jurors convicted Tago Hemopo of conspiracy to injure 22-year-old Rangiwhero Ngaronoa but acquitted him of being an accessory to murder after the fact. Photo / Michael Craig

Prosecutors alleged during the trial that Burns-Wong-Tung had been “furious” over suggestions by the victim a day earlier that a relative of hers had engaged in sexually inappropriate behaviour with a toddler. Although the allegation was later described as laughably false by both Burns-Wong-Tung and the toddler’s own mother, it set off a chain of events in which Ngaronoa was held captive by two of his uncles and brought to Burns-Wong-Tung for what was supposed to be a “hiding”.

Burns-Wong-Tung admitted in the witness box that it was her filmed arriving at a Weymouth, South Auckland, cul-de-sac in a bright red jumper with Hemopo behind the wheel of their Honda Accord on the Sunday afternoon of the fatal stabbing. She was then seen rummaging through the boot of the Accord - to retrieve a knife, prosecutors alleged, while she insisted it was to look for shoes - before the SUV containing Ngaronoa in the back seat arrived and parked in the middle of the street.

The grainy, partially obstructed footage then showed Burns-Wong-Tung march towards the SUV before what appeared to be a significant struggle with Ngaronoa. Two bystanders described hearing shrieks and screams coming from the SUV - one of them recalling that Burns-Wong-Tung’s fists were moving like “pistons”.

Burns-Wong-Tung told jurors she had got into a fistfight with Ngaronoa after he kicked her in the stomach, but she insisted she didn’t have a knife with her and he had no visible wounds as the confrontation ended and both vehicles sped off.

But just one minute and 19 seconds later, Ngaronoa’s uncles called 111. Roughly seven minutes later, another CCTV camera at Takanini Medical Centre showed Ngaronoa’s uncles dragging him into a Takanini medical centre, motionless, covered in blood and with eight knife wounds.

“It’s most unusual for a killing to be caught on camera,” prosecutor Todd Simmonds told jurors earlier this week, urging the group not to be “hoodwinked” by someone treating them “like a bunch of fools”.

“We can see for ourselves exactly what is happening,” he added. “You have real evidence here - tangible evidence. This is no whodunit. Jimel Burns-Wong-Tung did it, and it’s there for all of us to see.”

Gisborne resident Rangiwhero Toia Ngaronoa, 22, died in November 2021 after he was dropped off at a South Auckland medical facility with critical injuries. Photo / Supplied

Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, suggested to jurors that it was the uncles, Black Power members Rocky Ngapera and Thomas “BT” Ngapera, who stabbed the victim in the minute and a half between when the vehicles left the scene and when 111 was called.

They also were angry at their nephew and may have been infuriated after he fought with Burns-Wong-Tung instead of apologising - enough so, Mansfield theorised, that they might have stabbed him intending to violently teach a lesson but not expecting to kill him.

Both uncles had been set to stand trial alongside Burns-Wong-Tung and Hemopo, but they each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to injure just days before the trial began. They did not give evidence at the trial that followed.

And they weren’t the only ones thought to have insider knowledge of the killing that day who were reluctant to share what they knew with the jury.

The victim’s own father, a South Island-based Mongrel Mob member who had allegedly been on the phone with some of the defendants earlier that day, testified only very briefly via audio-visual link.

“Is it your position that you don’t want to say anything in relation to this matter?” Simmonds asked him.

“I don’t want to say nothing,” he responded.

The reluctance to testify was front-and-centre for jurors later in the trial when brothers Robert and Ford Stevens - who were in the backseat of the defendants’ Honda during the attack - did their best to destroy their own credibility.

The two were both deemed hostile witnesses after they claimed to have been too fried on methamphetamine that day to remember anything about what occurred. Robert Stevens, 20, repeatedly refused to acknowledge even minor details until after a short break midway through his second day of testimony.

“Can you see yourself in the [CCTV] video?” he was asked after the break.

“Yes,” he responded, pointing himself out as the person in a red cap. “I was there but I couldn’t see nothing. That’s the truth.”

What jurors hadn’t been told about the belated witness box concession was that during the break minutes earlier courthouse security alleged that Burns-Wong-Tung had yelled to Robert Stevens between two holding cells: “Say you were there but you didn’t see anything.”

Prosecutors suggested it might equate to witness tampering, although the defence said it might have come from an innocent place - an attempt to get him to testify more freely.

“Listen up. Stand when I talk to you,” the judge admonished the defendant before bringing the jury back in. “I will not have this trial derailed by that sort of behaviour. You do it again and there will be serious consequences, that I assure you.”

Burns-Wong-Tung briefly replied: “Your Honour, I did not speak to nobody down there.”

Robert Stevens’ testimony was followed immediately by that of his 21-year-old brother, Ford, who claimed at times he couldn’t read and that he couldn’t turn a page because his finger hurt. He said he’d rather be locked up than testify and had to be told by the judge at one point to stop rubbing his face against the witness box microphone, which he had earlier licked.

He also at one point pulled his shirt up over his head and, on several occasions, he flashed Mongrel Mob signs at a woman in the gallery. The significance of the gestures was not brought to the jury’s attention.

But it was the brothers whose narratives resulted in some of the most compelling accounts of what had happened that afternoon. Because they were both deemed hostile witnesses, prosecutors were allowed to introduce their signed affidavits to the jury contradicting their statements in the witness box. Both men denied ever having made the statements or that the signatures at the bottom were theirs.

Robert Stevens initially told police he and his brother had been visiting Burns-Wong-Tung at her home when they learned about the sexually inappropriate behaviour claim.

“Jimel came up with a plan to have the guy be brought to us so that Jimel can ask him about what he said, and we were going to give him a hiding,” he said, according to the document. “I remember hearing Jimel talking to Tago about it.”

Once they arrived at the Weymouth cul-de-sac, he said, Burns-Wong-Tung approached the SUV and “started stabbing him with a kitchen knife”.

“Tago was telling her that was enough and for her to come back to the car. But then she took it too far,” his statement read. ‘I remember the passenger from the truck was also saying that was enough. The guy was bleeding a lot. There was heaps of blood. There was enough blood for someone to lose their life.”

Ford Stevens’ statement had many similar details.

“I saw Jimel punching him and then I saw blood - it was quite a bit,” his statement said. “I don’t know exactly where it came from on his body cos I was in the car.

“I saw Jimel holding a knife. I don’t remember which hand it was in but that was the hand she was punching the boy with ... I heard screaming from the boy. I was trying to tell Jimel to stop.”

Defence lawyers Mansfield and Dale Dufty, who represented Tago, both argued that the brothers showed such contempt for the justice system while in the witness box that none of their statements - in the courtroom or to police - could be trusted. Mansfield also criticised police for typing out the statements rather than recording them or taking handwritten notes that could be reviewed.

It took jurors just over 12 hours of deliberations over three days to reach the verdicts.

Police vans and uniformed officers remained outside the courthouse for some time afterwards but left after the crowd dispersed with no incidents.

The defendant’s father, Willy Wong-Tung, known as King Willy Dog, died in 2017. He and other family members were senior members and leaders of the Mongrel Mob.

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.