Ford Tutaki, jailed for six years for assaulting, injuring and strangling a woman he kept in a room for a month. The photo is taken from a social media profile.
WARNING: This article describes an extreme instance of family violence which may be distressing for readers.
“I done that. I made her look like that.”
That was a man’s boast to his friends about a battered and bruised woman he kept in a room for a month and repeatedly assaulted and throttled.
Between March 13 and April 13 last year, Ford Cedrick Panapa Tutaki continually beat the woman with his fists and household implements and strangled her, at least once to the point of unconsciousness.
He verbally degraded her and laughed at her pain.
He targeted a particular area under her chin, causing the skin to split and eventually leaving her with a large, festering wound.
When police rescued her from the Hastings house where she was confined, she was covered in injuries.
He beat her so badly that at one point she was bedridden for a day, and on another occasion her eyes were swollen closed, leaving her unable to see and groping in the dark to find out where the next blow was coming from.
Tutaki, 35, whose social media profile includes a photograph of a Mongrel Mob patch, appeared in the Napier District Court on Friday after pleading guilty to representative charges of injuring with intent to injure, assault with a weapon, and strangulation.
Judge Richard Earwaker sent him to prison for six years.
The court was told Tutaki’s associates came to the Hastings house where he was keeping her to find her battered and bruised.
“I done that. I made her look like that,” Tutaki told them.
According to the Crown summary of facts, “He was proudly showing off how violent he could be to his associates, thinking that it would impress them”.
Although his associates sometimes remonstrated with Tutaki about how he was treating the woman, she was not rescued until a neighbour heard noises and called the police a month after she was first confined.
When the associates tried to reason with Tutaki and admonish him for his behaviour, he told them to “get f*****” and he would do whatever he wanted to do.
In an emailed statement, Women’s Refuge principal policy advisor Natalie Thorburn told NZME it was concerning that it took a month for anyone to invoke a police response to the women’s plight.
This was “despite so many people having witnessed or known about the violence and entrapment she was experiencing”, she said.
The woman, who had only known Tutaki for a short time, told police he was like “an animal you could not control” and she thought he was trying to kill her when he strangled her.
Tutaki and the woman moved to a house owned by a friend of his after they were asked to leave her family home when he kicked down the door of a bathroom she had locked herself in.
The first night they stayed in the new house was unremarkable, the Crown summary said. But Tutaki began assaulting her “ceaselessly” from the second day.
When being beaten, the woman would end up cowering in the same corner.
She told police that every time she got scared, she would go into the corner and make herself as small as possible.
Despite this, Tutaki would rain blows on her head and body with “any item handy”, including pots, pans, a broom handle, a vacuum cleaner handle and a heavy speaker.
He regularly strangled her to the point she could hardly breathe, and one time she lost consciousness.
Initially, the woman tried to fight back but soon realised it was futile because she was not strong enough.
Instead, she would simply give up and wait for him to stop, then try to sleep the pain off.
When Tutaki’s associates visited the house with cannabis, she was in so much pain that she smoked some to help her get to sleep.
The woman was allowed to leave the room only to go to the toilet, take a bath, or prepare food for Tutaki, who told her that he was beating her so no one else would love her.
When she left the room, she was guarded by Tutaki, who told her that she would be seriously hurt or killed if she tried to get away.
The woman made one attempt to escape, after Tutaki fell asleep while she was bathing.
Wearing only underwear, a singlet and towel, she ran from the house, asking people along the way for help, including a woman delivering pamphlets.
The woman tried to help, but by then Tutaki had caught up with his victim and insisted to the pamphlet deliverer that she was all right.
The victim felt she had no choice but to go back with him.
On one occasion, Tutaki punched the woman’s eyes so hard and so repeatedly that both eyes swelled completely shut and she was unable to see for 24 hours.
She described this as terrifying, leaving her reaching out with one hand to try to find out which direction the next blow was coming from.
“Describing the dark, she said there was no light and she could only vaguely see a shadow,” the Crown summary said.
One injury in particular left the woman permanently scarred.
Tutaki punched her repeatedly under the chin, targeting the same spot again and again, even after the skin split open and knowing how painful this would be.
The wound became infected and swollen from the bottom of her neck to the top of her chin, and under her ears.
Despite this, Tutaki would not allow her to leave and seek medical attention for the wound or infection.
Instead, the woman made a small incision herself near the site of the initial wound to relieve the pressure.
“An enormous amount of pus and fluid flowed from this incision,” the Crown summary said.
Judge Earwaker said that Tutaki was using drugs heavily at the time and, when interviewed by a probation officer for a pre-sentence report showed no insight into the offending.
He also said Tutaki claimed the victim had been self-harming and caused most of her injuries.
“You said she was whipping and cutting herself, not you,” the judge said.
A letter given to the court for the sentencing said that Tutaki was now sorry and remorseful, and wanted help with his drug use and anger, but Judge Earwaker said he had difficulty accepting how genuine it was.
He jailed Tutaki for six years on the strangulation charge, and for three years concurrently on the other charges.
The maximum penalty for strangulation is seven years in prison.
The summary of facts said that Tutaki isolated the woman to the point where she felt she could not reach out to anyone, and he stopped her from having any contact with her family.
She said later that her father expected her to see her come home in a casket.
Outside the court, a member of the woman’s family said they felt “blessed” to have her back alive.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.
Cook Islands officials have discussed seabed minerals research with China.