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Four men have appeared in court charged with aggravated robbery after two brutal and unprovoked attacks on two young couples on Auckland's North Shore early yesterday.
Two men aged 18, a 22-year-old and another man were granted interim name suppression by Judge Roy Wade at North Shore District Court this afternoon. They each face four counts of aggravated robbery.
The group were remanded in custody, without making bail applications, until January 24.
North Shore CIB's Detective Sergeant Scott Armstrong earlier said more charges could be laid depending on the medical condition of the victims, who were all in hospital.
The men were among five arrested last night after four attacks in North Shore in the past 48 hours.
A 16-year-old from Piha on Auckland's West Coast earlier appeared in North Shore Youth Court. All details of his hearing were suppressed.
Three of the arrests were a result of information provided by the public, and media publicity given to the attacks, Detective Sergeant Armstrong said.
One of the men was arrested during an incident in which a 17-year-old was attacked on Takapuna Beach about 6.45pm yesterday.
The teenager has minor injuries and is recovering in North Shore Hospital.
Mr Armstrong said three teams of investigators had worked long hours to achieve the arrests and were satisfied with the outcome.
In the first attack, a 20-year-old woman's eye socket was fractured and one of her fingers broken by three men who bashed her and her 25-year-old partner with a softball bat as they sat in a a car at Milford beach at 1.30am yesterday.
The terrified woman fled - swimming across a river inlet in darkness - to the Beach Rd home of Justice of the Peace Pat Sampson, who woke to the sound of his doorbell ringing.
The bloodstained woman then collapsed in his hallway.
"Imagine a girl who's at your door ... she's dripping wet and the blood's flowing with the water," he said.
"It was like diluted paint coming down off her face. Her face and head were a mess. A delightful young woman who had been terribly smashed up.
"She was bashed on both sides of her face. She was bleeding from both arms. What a lot of guts in her to run away, see the water, swim across it, run up the road into our driveway and press the bell."
The woman, who Mr Sampson believed was a Russian student, was trembling and was hard to understand because of her accent and her trauma.
"I rang 111 while my wife comforted her," he said. "She was very traumatised. It's a sad sign of the times. It's just dreadful."
The woman is now in Middlemore Hospital and will have plastic surgery.
Police say the woman and her boyfriend had been having a quiet beer in their car when a man came up and asked them for a beer. Then two more men approached.
The group attacked the man as he sat in the driver's seat, then pulled the woman from the car.
Both were beaten with a baseball bat.
The man also fled and tried to wake nearby residents but no one heard him and he staggered 300m along Craig Rd to Omana Rd, where he was seen by a passing police officer.
A trail of bloodstains marked his route.
In the second attack, on Lake Rd, Takapuna, about 4am, another couple, also aged 20 and 25, were set upon by a group of men, who pulled up in a car beside them and attacked them, leaving them for dead.
The officer in charge of both cases, Detective Sergeant Adam Lough, said the attacks were "completely unprovoked and brutal".
The woman from the second attack - the most seriously injured of the victims - was in Auckland Hospital for neurosurgery last night after her condition deteriorated.
Both male victims had bleeding on the brain and were last night in North Shore Hospital under observation.
Mr Lough said a team of 12 detectives was working on both cases.
- With NZPA
