Demetrius Pairama, 17, was known as a bubbly teenager with a bright smile.
Demetrius Pairama, 17, was known as a bubbly teenager with a bright smile.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Days after the body of 17-year-old Dimetrius “Precious” Pairama was found concealed in a rusted steel drum outside an abandoned South Auckland state home, a 16-year-old who had helped torture her and had helped to dump her body told a youth worker that she was having trouble with nightmares.
It was suggested she might find it easier to sleep if she wrote her feelings down on paper, which she did.
Those words were read to jurors today at her murder trial.
“The reason why I beat up Dimetrius is because she was talking shit about me,” the 16-year-old revealed via bubbly handwriting in a half page of uncompleted text. “She was telling the other girls that I’m ugly and I have a lot of pimples on my face.
“It made me angry [because] I would never talk shit about her or do anything to hurt her feeling[s] but I was shocked when I heard what she had been saying about me.”
The defendant, now 21 years old, has been on trial for three weeks in the High Court at Auckland - the final of three people who were charged with murder after Pairama’s horrific July 2018 death.
She has acknowledged she was one of four people in the Māngere house when prosecutors say Pairama was repeatedly punched and stomped, forced to disrobe and tied naked to a chair with soiled underwear stuffed into her mouth, burned on sensitive areas of her body with a makeshift blowtorch, had household chemicals poured on top of her, burning her eyes, and was ultimately forced to choose the method of her murder: hanging or stabbing.
Ashley Winter, then 27, and co-defendant Kerry Te Amo, 24, were found guilty by a jury the following year. The current defendant did not join the pair at that trial. She continues to have name suppression, as does a 14-year-old who also hit Pairama and served as a lookout during her hanging but was given immunity in exchange for her co-operation with police.
A woman with name suppression is on trial in the High Court at Auckland, accused of having helped kidnap and murder 17-year-old Dimetrius Pairama in July 2018. Photo / Michael Craig
Prosecutors today called to the witness box two women who were employed at Whakatakapokai, an Oranga Tamariki youth justice facility, when the defendant spent time there in the weeks after Pairama’s death.
Even though it’s now been five years, Mikayla Burton said she still remembers “clear as day” the night the defendant outlined in explicit detail her participation in the torture of her “best friend” - a seemingly nonchalant confession by the teen as she played a game of cards with Burton and another employee.
“It was the thing that struck me the most,” Burton told jurors. “It was like she was reading a shopping list. It was so, almost, normal.”
Her absence of emotions - talking normally about something so obviously not normal - is what stuck with the worker, who immediately after putting the teen to bed documented the conversation in an email to her supervisor.
“I remember going into the office and thinking it just can’t be true,” she said today, testifying via audio-video feed from Australia.
Defence lawyer David Niven conceded at the outset of the trial earlier this month that his client participated in “some of the torture” of Pairama. But she did not willingly participate or aid in Pairama’s murder, Niven said, describing the then-16-year-old as having been afraid of co-defendant Winter - described as older, larger framed and more aggressive.
In separate discussions with youth workers, the defendant said she tried to talk Winter out of the hanging and she didn’t think it would go that far.
“As she was hanging she was crying,” Burton recalled the teen saying, adding that the defendant claimed she asked Winter to move the chair closer to Pairama’s feet as she struggled in the noose but was told, “No, let her die”.
Ashley Winter and Kerry Te Amo were found guilty of murdering Dimetrius Pairama. Photos / NZME
“She was talking about her friend that died but I don’t remember there ever being a huge amount of emotion except when she was talking about her mum,” Burton testified, describing the defendant as “always well mannered”.
Mona Monazahian, who also worked at the facility, recalled a similar conversation with the defendant around the same time. Without prompting, the 16-year-old said she had beaten her friend after finding out she had been “talking smack”, the witness said.
“Are you sure she did it?” Monazahian recalled asking the defendant, about Pairama’s alleged “smack” talking.
“Yes, she admitted it,” the defendant allegedly replied while making gestures mimicking kicking and punching someone on the floor. “But I was too angry so I kept beating her.”
The worker recalled asking the 16-year-old: “Why didn’t you stop?”
But the teen explained that Winter - who had gang-related reasons for wanting to hurt Pairama - didn’t allow them to stop the hours-long beating or the torture that followed.
Monazahian suggested the defendant put her feelings down on paper to help her sleep. The teen started the project but said she wasn’t feeling well and went to take a nap before she was finished, leaving her writing on the table.
Monazahian said she took a look and when she realised it was about the facts of the case rather than the teen’s emotions, she made a photocopy.
Later that day, Monazahian said she talked to the teen again as she was writing rap lyrics about Pairama’s death. While she didn’t copy that document, she recalled the lyrics being along the lines of “Why did you have to leave me behind?”, “Why did you have to kill yourself?” and “I will miss you”.
She said there seemed to be a disconnect in the teen’s sometimes conflicting statements - describing Pairama repeatedly as her best friend but then describing her torture matter-of-factly and saying she wanted to get a teardrop tattoo under her eye because she had killed someone.
It was “almost like two different personalities”, she said.
“It was hard to fathom the person who has done this is the same person sitting in front of me having a normal conversation,” she said.
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.
