Steve Braunias on the trial of methamphetamine desperadoes.
A tall, slender man, very good looking behind his Covid-19 mask, with dark sunglasses concealing the white fire of methamphetamine burning in his eyes, ran down a driveway in West Auckland holding a cut-down, bolt-action gun in both hands, pointed it at a man in motorcycle leathers standing next to his Yamaha bike, and shouted, “Hand over the s***.”
The black motorcycle helmet that Robbie Hart wore concealed that he, too, was on methamphetamine, a lot of it - two men up and about on an early Friday morning, both of them flying on a drug that soared too high for sleep. Dylan Harris, cocking the cheaply assembled gun held together with red insulation tape, had been awake for five days on methamphetamine. He was wanting to make it six. The only point of his existence, which took him to this particularly sharp point, a point narrowing down for each of the 37 seconds of his rendezvous in a driveway with Robbie Hart, was to get more methamphetamine.
Hart, Harris - two handsome guys, both of them sleepless addicts. They lived lives as shadows of their actual, better selves and actually, they cast the same shadow. Their silhouettes were shaped by methamphetamine. They had never met before the 37 seconds of sharing each other’s company in a driveway in New Lynn, that flat, damp centre of West Auckland. It took Harris about four steps to reach Hart. Hart took a step backwards and told Harris he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Harris, Hart - even their names were similar, and it caused a bit of confusion now and then at the High Court at Auckland this past fortnight. Harris had got out of the passenger door of a Suzuki Swift before he ran down the driveway, pulling out the gun from the front pocket of his hoodie; when he took the witness stand on Monday, likely the most persuasive day of the trial for the murder of Robbie Hart, Crown prosecutor Robin McCoubrey asked him to retrace the exact movements that resulted in the killing on November 5, 2021, and said to him, “Look, Mr Hart, you’re in a Suzuki Swift.”
“Mr Harris,” said Mr Harris.
“Sorry Mr Harris, my apologies,” said Mr McCoubrey.
The gun was never found. Harris drew a picture of it in pencil and it was produced in court. He had a nice line; there was a clear intelligence in his demeanour in the witness box, and maybe a sense of humour, too, in the tattoos that sleeved his arms - a bright red dollar sign, a screaming face. His purpose in electing to give evidence was to explain that the shooting of Robbie Hart was not intentional, that he accepted it was manslaughter but not murder, and that the gun just went off. He shouted at the retreating Hart, “Stop f***ing around. I know you’ve got some stuff.” Hart took another step back. Harris was holding the gun at chest height.
The driveway was next to the New Haven Motel on Great North Rd. Ian Waldron, the motelier, wore slippers and walked with a cane to the witness box; he was asked to describe the neighbouring property, and detailed that great New Zealand institution, the tinnie house. “People next door have lots and lots of visitors, always coming into my carpark and just sitting there. They just sit in their cars, and I ask them to please move … They come at all times in the morning. They come at two or three in the morning. They open the boots of cars, they do all sorts of operations, whatever they’re doing. Going next door backwards and forwards, and it happens all day long and all night.”
It made sense to park in the driveway: it was familiar territory, a kind of service station forecourt of drugs. A phone message was sent to Hart that morning asking to buy 14 grams of methamphetamine, also known as half a round. Hart quoted the price at $3000. He agreed to meet the caller in New Lynn. Hart parked his Yamaha in the driveway expecting to see the woman who owned the phone. Harris - a stranger, his face behind a mask - showed up instead, at speed, running straight at him with a loaded weapon, and when Hart took another step backwards, Harris said in the witness box that he hit the side of his helmet with the gun to show him he meant business. It went off. It fired a .22 Winchester bullet. It shot Hart in the head. He died instantly. He was 40, a much-loved father of two sons.
People from both of their families came to the trial, and so did a quite striking woman (black leather mittens, gold hoop earrings) who attended for a quite different purpose, something personal: to give the evils to Jasmine Murray, who was co-accused of the murder along with her partner, Adam North. Police discovered evidence suggesting the couple had used the woman’s stolen phone and pretended to be her in their messages to Hart, setting up a drug deal. Harris said in court that it was all North’s idea - North arranged the meet, North owned the gun, North gave it to Harris with instructions to wave it at Hart and make off with the half a round. Crown prosecutor Robin McCoubrey composed a masterly sentence in his tight little economical use of 16 words to tell the jury what the police believed had happened: “Mr North drove Mr Harris to shoot Mr Hart who was lured there by Ms Murray.”
So succinct, so concise, but the essence of it - an organised hit, the desire to kill - was rejected. The jury went out at 2.15pm on Wednesday this week. They were served a late lunch of sandwiches and pastries. They went home at 4pm. They returned to court at 10am on Thursday and knocked on the door of the jury room about 11.15am to signal they had reached a verdict. It really hadn’t taken them very long - less than three hours - to find shooter Dylan Harris, getaway driver Adam North and his girlfriend Jasmine Murray all guilty of manslaughter, but none of them guilty of murder. Sentencing is set for June 9.
A scourge, an epidemic - the unspeakable truth is that methamphetamine is better than other drugs, a guaranteed hit of strength and fantastical energy. Drugs alter the mind. As an absolute drug, methamphetamine alters the mind absolutely. Hart fell on top of his Yamaha, knocking it to the ground; Harris stood there, still holding the gun with both hands, still pointing it at him. Meta Nafoi, a cleaner at the New Haven Motel, was washing the dishes in Unit 12 when she heard the gunshot, looked to the window and saw Harris standing over Hart, continuing to point the gun at the body of a man he had just killed.
“He just dropped right there,” Harris said in court. He wept. “Knocked the bike over, and that was it. He fell over, the bike fell over, he hit the ground and the helmet came loose and it was lying on the ground, next to him.” What else had he noticed? He said, “There was a little hole in the side of his head.” He wept again, and so did members of the jury.
His lawyer, Ron Mansfield KC, asked him, “How quickly did it take place?”
“Blink of an eye.”
McCoubrey conducted the cross-examination. He was brusque, abrupt, and practised the old tactic that the answer is much less interesting than the question. He asked Harris, “The gun went off because you pulled the trigger and the bullet went exactly where you were aiming, that’s the truth of it, isn’t it?”
“No.”
What’s it like to be on methamphetamine when freaking out? Harris ran from the scene of the crime, fast. A couple were in their car at the traffic lights on Great North Road when they saw Harris cross five lanes at speed. Esther Padfield appeared as a witness, and said, “He was in a great big hurry, almost sprinting through the quite steady traffic, and I remember thinking, ‘He’s about to get hit by a car’, cos he wasn’t stopping to look at the traffic. He was just looking straight ahead.” Her husband, Jarred Padfield, said in court, “He just went straight across, dodging traffic, you know, zigzagging.”
Harris’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield, who has never missed an opportunity to ask a witness to state the obvious, put to Padfield, “Do we take from what you’re telling us that it appeared the man was in a hurry?”
Padfield duly stated the bleeding obvious. “That’s how it appeared, yes.”
Ian Waldron at the New Haven Motel called the police. Two constables, stopping to get out their Glocks, arrived quickly at the scene. Constable Jordan Hage found Hart slumped over the Yamaha and checked for a pulse.
McCoubrey: “Did you find any signs of life?”
The police officer: “No.”
It was a curious verdict. No doubt it brought relief to the defendants. Things were kind of straightforward for Harris - he either had intent to kill, or he didn’t. As McCoubrey said to him in cross-examination, “The only disagreement we have is if you squeezed the trigger or it went off accidentally.” But things were more... complicated, for North and Murray, the couple so in love that they tattooed each other’s names on their bodies.
“If you are a party to a crime, you are as guilty as the person who commits the crime,” McCoubrey said. “Any number of people can be guilty of a crime if they intend to assist the crime.” Even as parties to a homicide, though, their conviction for murder felt distant. Their defence was that they had no idea what was about to happen. North’s lawyer Sam Wimsett put to Harris that it was his gun, not North’s; Murray’s lawyer Philip Holden told the jury that she just went along for the ride. She pinned all the blame on Harris in an interview she gave to police after she was charged with murder five days after the killing. She claimed she had no idea there was a gun, no idea there was a drug deal, no idea about anything, really. “It’s been a long day … I want my bed.” She was 20.
It was an interesting interview. It was conducted by Detective Sebastian Stowers, a quietly spoken man with a pleasant manner and a talent for listening. He listened to Murray hanging Harris out to dry: “I want nothing more than for the person who done this to be f***ing locked up and f***ing paying for what he’s done.”
Harris returned the favour in cross-examination. Up until then, there had been no direct evidence alleging that Murray had sent the messages to Hart, and impersonated the woman whose phone had been stolen: “Sweet, thanks hun.” Harris was asked who was sending the messages to Hart when they drove to meet him in New Lynn. Jasmine Murray, he said. He added that she would almost definitely have seen the gun in his lap.
When he raced across Great North Rd and got in their getaway car, he told Mansfield, he dropped the gun in the footwell and said: “Go.” North and Murray were freaking out. They heard the gunshot. Harris said: “F***, it just went off.”
They made their getaway. They soon parted ways. North dumped the car in Blockhouse Bay. Harris made arrangements to hide out in Rotorua. The Armed Offenders Squad were called to New Lynn and burst on to the scene of the crime in full regalia. A news report went out that afternoon about a killing in a driveway off Great North Rd. Jarred and Esther Padfield read about it online and they immediately contacted the police to describe Dylan Harris’ frenzied run across five lanes of traffic.
Methamphetamine addicts appeared as witnesses. They were like religious maniacs who shared the same core belief. Get more methamphetamine. “Hand over the s***.” But it was a strange thing; even though they had something extremely powerful in common, hardly any of them knew each other, only by name or Facebook account. They networked, ghosts in the machine, working around the clock to get more methamphetamine.
In her opening address, Crown prosecutor Sarah Murphy described the killing as “an execution”. Murphy took very little part in the trial proceedings after that and no reference was ever made again to an execution. But the Crown stuck to the same sensationalist theory. In his closing address, McCoubrey told the jury, “What happened was meant to happen … There is far too much planning and too much organising for this to be a casual standover ... These three were acting as a team, in concert with each other”, etc.
It was a hastily assembled team of methamphetamine desperadoes. Harris and Murray had never met; the only use Harris and North had for each other was methamphetamine. “It’s amazing, these flyby mates,” said Ron Mansfield. “It speaks to a standover gone wrong in a desperate way.” He stood closer to the jury than any of the other lawyers, and his message to them was that the thing closest to the truth was the all-consuming, teeth-grinding desire for methamphetamine. They wanted it. It’s all they ever wanted.