Teen testifies at Jovan Pora kidnap-manslaughter trial that Katelyn Rua-Tuhou had tried to flee car on Auckland motorway before

Five months before Katelyn Rua-Tuhou fell to her death through an open car door on Auckland’s Southwestern Motorway, she had capped a night of over-indulging red wine with a very similar set of circumstances, a young witness told jurors today at the manslaughter trial of his older brother.

“She opened the door and tried to jump out of the car,” explained the witness, who was 14 years old at the time of the alleged incident in July 2022. “This was out of nowhere. We didn’t know why she was doing it.”

Prosecutors say Rua-Tuhou’s death on Boxing Day that same year was because she panicked when taken against her will by defendant Jovan Aroha Zachariah Pora, her boyfriend of three years who has admitted a history of threats and violence against her.

Pora, 21, has been on trial in the High Court at Auckland for the past two-and-a-half weeks accused of kidnapping and “fright response” manslaughter, which occurs when a threatened person’s fight or flight response leads to their death.

But the defence case, which began yesterday with Pora’s trip to the witness box, is that Rua-Tuhou was neither kidnapped nor threatened when she opened the car door on Boxing Day. Jurors will have to decide if she opened the car door out of “self-preservation or intoxication”, defence lawyer Vivienne Feyen said yesterday.

Testifying today via audio-video feed from another courtroom due to his age, Pora’s younger brother, now 16, described how Rua-Tuhou had moved into their family’s New Lynn home and became a part of the family.

“She was like an older sister to me,” he said. “She was kind, generous. If I ever needed help with anything she’d always be there to help me.”

But there had been occasions when she was drinking, he said, when she would scream, trash rooms and lash out with scratches and bites.

“When she got drunk, on occasions she was happy and everything was fine but mostly she’d turn violent,” he said.

He was specifically asked to recall an evening of drinking in July 2022 that ended with her in police custody after he said no one could handle her. At some point after she and Pora made dinner together as they drank wine, “there was a change in her attitude and demeanour”, the younger brother said.

Kidnap accused Jovan Pora returns to Manukau District Court in 2022 after being charged with manslaughter as well. Photo / Dean Purcell

“She wasn’t calming down,” he testified. “Jovan decided she had too much to drink and needed to sleep.”

The teen said he then heard Rua-Tuhou screaming and banging around from the upstairs room she shared with Pora. When he peeked inside the room, she wasn’t injured but the room was dishevelled, he said.

“He [Pora] came out and he told me to hold the door because she was too drunk and she was just going to destroy the rest of the house,” the teen said, explaining that it was then agreed among others in the house to take Rua-Tuhou to her father’s house in Manurewa.

The witness said he got in the front passenger seat of the car while a friend of his mother’s drove. Pora did not come along. It was on a surface street while en route to her father’s house where she opened the backseat door the first time, the teen said, explaining that the car stopped immediately and he jumped in the back to restrain her.

“She was already halfway out the door,” he told jurors. “I had to push her back into the car.”

When he asked why she had done that, she wouldn’t answer but started yelling that she wanted Pora, he said.

“When we were on the motorway she tried to open the door a few more times but she didn’t get out. Just the whole way she was screaming and kicking and crying.

“She was trying to wrap her hands around the driver’s neck at one point so I had to stop her from doing that... She got angry at me and started to bite and scratch me.”

While speeding to her father’s house so they could drop her off, the car was pulled over by police, the teen said, adding that officers had to chase after Rua-Tuhou as she ran away from the vehicle. The officers then agreed to follow them to the father’s house, eventually taking Rua-Tuhou into custody after the father said it might be better than her staying there, the teen said.

During cross-examination by prosecutor Henry Benson-Pope, the teen said he didn’t know about any violence between the couple. But that same month Rua-Tuhou had texted another person that she thought she was going to die after Pora came home drunk and “full-on bashed me all night”. Pora, testifying yesterday, said he was blackout drunk on the night of the assault and remembered nothing of the incident but conceded it must have happened.

The teen told prosecutors he didn’t know if police were told about the car door being opened.

Witnesses called by prosecutors earlier in the trial said Rua-Tuhou was screaming for help as Pora drove off with her on the morning of her death. She was not a willing passenger, they said.

Pora, meanwhile, has insisted that he was only trying to take her to the home they shared after her family asked him to come and collect her because she was too drunk.

The trial continues before Justice Mathew Downs 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.