Murder accused Ethan Dodds admits he killed Benjamin Mcintosh in West Auckland park

“What the f*** did you do that for? F***, cuz, what the f***!”

That was what one murder defendant allegedly said the other amid the shock and panic after the accidental killing of Benjamin “Dekoy” Mcintosh in a West Auckland reserve two years ago, one of the men testified yesterday.

“I don’t know,” Ethan Dodds recounted responding to lifelong friend Julius “Pete East” Te Hivaka that morning as they fled the Harold Moody Park in Glen Eden, where Mcintosh, 36, was left for dead slumped over in the driver’s seat of his car.

“It wasn’t meant to happen!”

The duo have been on trial since last week in the High Court at Auckland, accused of intentionally firing at Mcintosh at close range with a sawn-off semi-automatic rifle after luring the small-scale drug dealer to the reserve under the guise of a sale in the early hours of June 3, 2022.

Mcintosh suffered two gunshot wounds believed to have been from a single bullet that entered and exited his shoulder before lodging in his brain.

Prosecutors acknowledged at the outset of the trial that they didn’t know which one of the two pulled the trigger.

But if jurors agree that both of them were in on the plan, it ultimately won’t matter because that would make them both guilty of murder, they said.

They spent much of the past week focused on CCTV, telecom data, DNA and fingerprint evidence placing Dodds and Te Hivaka at the scene of the shooting.

But after the Crown finished calling its last witness yesterday, defence lawyer Anoushka Bloem, representing Dodds, revealed to jurors for the first time that her client doesn’t dispute he was at the scene of the shooting.

In fact, she said, he’s the one responsible for the gun having discharged.

But causing someone’s death isn’t the same as murder, she added, suggesting that her client never intended to hurt anyone.

“He thought he was taking an unloaded gun to Moody Park,” Bloem said.

“Clearly, he was wrong.”

The gun was meant to be a harmless prop to instil fear into Mcintosh, she said.

Ben "Dekoy" Mcintosh was shot to death at a West Auckland reserve in 2022.

“He is here to fess up to what happened. He is here to tell the truth,” Bloem told jurors. “He may have made some unwise decisions after Mr Mcintosh died, but that doesn’t make him guilty of murder.”

Dodds, 24, spent the next few hours in the witness box, sometimes looking downcast and contrite but never getting overly emotional as he shared a disjointed narrative of what happened that morning in a sometimes barely discernible mumble.

He said he had been looking to score drugs that morning when he decided to discreetly grab the gun from underneath his mattress so he could take it with him. He had recently obtained the firearm after the Hillsborough home where he lived with his mother had been shot at twice over the past month, he said, adding that he thought it might come in handy after hearing a rumour about Mcintosh.

“He had gone over to my best friend’s mum’s house and scared her with a gun in her own home,” he contended.

He demonstrated unloading the weapon in his room, watching the bullets fall to the ground before picking them up and putting them in his pocket. He then put the gun in a black bag before leaving the home with Te Hivaka. He emphasised that no one else, including Te Hivika or his family members, was aware he had grabbed the gun.

“At that time, no one knew what I was thinking. No one knew at all, to be honest,” he said. “I said I was going in there to get my clothes. All of them were distracted, eh, like talking to each other and all that.”

Once at the park, Te Hivaka had gone to Mcintosh’s car first and was talking to him in the front seat when Dodds said he retrieved the gun.

“I jumped out of the car and I had it to my side. I walked sideways so he wouldn’t be able to see the gun in the mirror,” he testified, explaining that he then knocked on Mcintosh’s back passenger door and waited for him to unlock it. After taking a seat, he recalled abruptly interrupting the conversation between Mcintosh and Te Hivaka to yell something along the lines of: “F***ing go to my family’s house?”

Mcintosh turned around and looked back at him, he recalled, adding that it seemed like he was about to jump out of the car and run.

“And I’ve gone to lunge for him - that’s when my gun went off,” Dodds said.

His lawyer asked him what he was trying to do when the gun fired.

Julius Te Hivaka, Ethan Dodds and Tamirah Baker are co-defendants in the High Court at Auckland trial relating to the death of Ben Mcintosh (background) in Glen Eden in June 2022. Photo / Dean Purcell

“I honestly, I don’t know,” he responded. “It happened so fast. It was like a reflex. . . . I can’t really explain it. I guess I was trying to grab him or something.”

The blast of the gun, followed immediately by Mcintosh slumping forward, gave both him and Te Hivaka a fright, he said.

“It was a surreal moment,” he said, explaining that the two decided to flee rather than call 111 because he assumed - incorrectly, he would later learn - that Mcintosh had died instantly.

As he jumped out of the car, he grabbed a bag on the car’s centre console that contained Mcintosh’s belongings.

“I grabbed it,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

Dodds is expected to continue testifying tomorrow when the trial resumes before Justice Graham Lang and the jury.

He and Te Hivaka have been joined in the dock by Tamirah Baker, who was Mcintosh’s on-again-off-again girlfriend. She was charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder for allegedly helping Dodds evade arrest several days after the shooting. Dodds said he had known Baker’s brothers when he was about 14 but had just days before the shooting connected with her via Facebook.

Dodds’ mother, Donna Dodds, was also initially set to join him in the dock, accused of attempting to pervert the course of justice by providing him a fake alibi. However, she pleaded guilty to the charge before the trial began.

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.