Two friends accused of fatally shooting duo during Auckland ‘crime spree’

Siaosi Tulua was killed in his own home in 2019. Photo / Police Ten 7

There are two rifles, real mean-looking pieces of black metal and death, presented very artfully inside Perspex cases at the front of Courtroom 7 in the High Court at Auckland. It takes two people to lift the heavier of the cases, and both will be shown to the jury who were chosen on Monday morning on day one of a double-murder trial.

The trial is set down for eight weeks, with jurors selected to sit in for that long. It signals that the prosecution will take great and exacting care in laying out the case against two friends who are accused of fatally shooting two men in separate incidents a month apart in South Auckland in 2019.

It was one hell of a month in Auckland with a spate of shootings, the court heard. Jurors were told by the Crown of a programme of mayhem, intimidation, murder.

“They were on a crime spree,” prosecutor David Stevens said, twice, in his opening address. As well as murder charges, the two men are facing charges of discharging a firearm with intent to injure, assault with intent to rob, unlawful possession of a firearm, and burglary. One of the men has name suppression. The other man is Tamati Simpson.

According to the Crown, the timeline of their alleged “spree” ran from April 17 (a shooting at a window in Takinini, missing the occupant who was selling drugs), to April 20 (two incidents that day: a standover, and later the murder of Siaosi Tulua, a 39-year-old father of five, at his home in Clover Park), to May 10 (burglary), and finally to May 17 (the fatal drive-by shooting of Faaifo Joseph Siaosi, 23, on the lawn outside his home in Ōtara).

The way the Crown alleges it, they were like acts of friendship. Stevens said Simpson and his mate were close friends, who had known each other since school, and there they were in that busy month four years ago, always hanging out and doing things together.

The court heard, about the alleged murder on April 20: “They drove there together with a firearm.” On the alleged burglary on May 10, and the alleged murder on May 17: “They drove there together with a firearm.”

They were both 21. They had common interests, said Stevens, things they both liked talking about.

“Gambling. Drugs. Money. And guns.”

Stevens told the jury that they planned a robbery to make up for money lost on pokie machines. They needed a gun to do that, and one of them got hold of their uncle, he alleged.

After the second alleged murder, the helpful uncle was contacted again (a text to him read, “How do I get rid of the thing?”), and he buried the weapon in a backpack, the court heard.

There are a lot of defence lawyers in Courtroom 7. One of them has colonised the press bench.

None elected to say anything after Stevens made his opening address, but eight weeks provides a lot of opportunity to unpick the Crown case.

On day one, all the jury heard was an alleged outline of two close friends briefly assigning themselves as the baddest guys in the whole damned town, driving around together shooting, threatening, stealing, armed with the two weapons now stored at the front of the court, a cut-off .22, and the larger of the two guns, a long-barrelled .243, which New Zealand shooters of rats, rabbits, and possums will recognise as - yeah, really, this is what it’s called - a varmint rifle.