In 45 terrifying seconds, a group of masked youths netted $140,000 of jewellery in a daylight raid on a store, smashing cabinets with hammers and tyre irons.
A judge said later that the four teenagers caused “mayhem” in the shop.
Fearful staff locked themselves in a back room before the youths, ranging in age from 14 to 19, piled back out of the door and into a getaway car parked on the footpath.
The oldest of them, Sitaling Ale, is now in prison for the raid on the Napier Pascoes shop in July and five other robberies that left a trail of broken shopfronts, stolen getaway cars, and victims across the upper North Island spanning two years.
A probation officer believes there is a high risk he will reoffend, but a judge has exhorted the former church Sunday school attendee to find a better way in life.
“I do not believe, Mr Ale, that this is all you are meant to be,” Judge Gordon Matenga told Ale when he came before him in the Napier District Court.
“I believe there is more in you and you can change from this. Please do your best over the next few years.”
The scale of Ale’s offending has been outlined in Judge Matenga’s sentencing notes, which were published online recently with victims’ names redacted after Ale was sentenced in October.
They provide a detailed account of the Pascoes robbery — one of a string of similar raids on jewellery shops by various groups of teens and young people that have left retailers rattled and caused escalating public concern.
In reality, crimes committed by young people have been trending down for more than a decade, until a big spike came in the post-Covid years fuelled by hundreds of serious and persistent offenders.
Ale fits such a profile. He had been robbing for years.
The robbery at the Pascoes store in July was clearly not the work of a first-timer or opportunist thief. It was well executed. It was all over in about a minute. The thieves struck at 4.55pm, just as the staff were about to close up for the day.
They came armed, with their faces masked and carrying bags to stash the stolen watches, rings and medallions they grabbed from the broken display cases.
They were also brazen — the robbery was in a street in the very heart of the Napier central business district, in full view of members of the public who witnessed the group fleeing the scene.
Those witnesses might have been able to describe the stolen Mitsubishi used as a getaway vehicle, but that would have been little help to the police in the short term.
The youths drove the Nissan to a suburban street just outside the city centre and dumped it, leaving the engine running, transferring to another car, a Ford, which they had stolen from Hamilton a day or two earlier.
Three youths were arrested for the Pascoes robbery in the days after it happened. Police said at the time they were still looking for the fourth. Some of the jewellery was recovered.
One of the reasons the public hears little of the consequences for youths who offend is that those aged 17 or below are usually dealt with in the Youth Justice System, where reporting restrictions apply and identities are protected before hardened criminals are made.
But at 19, Sitaling Ale can be named and his offending, which has been dealt with in the district court, can be reported. This offending stretches back to 2021, when Ale was only 17.
Ale has pleaded guilty to five other aggravated robberies or aggravated burglaries that pre-date the Napier raid.
They have common features: the use of a stolen car to conduct the raid, and masked teenagers carrying weapons. It is not clear if Ale was working with the same group all the time, but he was the common link between all of them.
The first robbery to feature in the sentencing notes was on July 18, 2021. Ale was one of a group of five who pulled up at the Mobil service station in Mercer south of Auckland in a stolen Toyota.
It was 10.40pm and the front doors of the service station were locked. When one of Ale’s associates began hammering on the doors, the attendant retreated to a back office, set off an alarm and called the police.
This did not deter the group, who broke in through the doors and stole various items — including ice cream. They were all wearing black clothing, with their faces covered and only their eyes visible.
The group then drove directly to the GAS petrol station on Great South Rd at Pukeno.
It was closed, but they broke forcefully through the roller door carrying hammers, screwdrivers and a tyre iron.
They raided the tills, the potato chip stand, and — again — the ice cream freezer.
The group got away with about $700 of loot. They did about $30,000 of damage to the shop.
About 3.30am on July 29, 2021, the sole staff member of an all-night store at Clover Park, Auckland, heard a loud screech outside, heralding the arrival of Ale and his associates in a stolen Nissan.
They entered the shop with their faces covered. One had a 60cm-long iron rod and another a cricket bat.
The group were in the store for two minutes, targeting the cash registers and the cigarette cabinet.
They got away with goods and cash worth nearly $10,800.
On November 21, 2021, Ale and four others raided a Caltex service station on State Highway 22 at Karaka.
It was about 6am. There were no customers in the store and only a sole attendant, who had briefly gone to the back of the store.
Ale and four other youths arrived in a stolen Toyota. One of them stayed in the car as the others entered the shop.
Ale was holding a tyre iron and jumped the front counter. He headed towards the till while one of his associates went for the cigarette cabinet.
The service station attendant came back into the main part of the shop to be confronted by a youth — not Ale — wearing a black hoodie, a facemask and a red bandana, carrying a tyre iron, which he raised above his head as he advanced towards the worker.
The attendant managed to retreat to the back of the shop, leaving the raiders to make several trips to and from the car, loading goods into the vehicle.
Judge Matenga’s sentencing notes detailed another incident, which was undated, but during which a Mount Eden superette worker was struck on the head twice with a tyre iron and kicked in the torso.
Again, the youths arrived at the superette in a stolen vehicle, this time a Mazda. Again, they were hooded and masked. The man who struck the worker was armed with the tyre iron. Ale was carrying a broom.
As with the previous robberies, the youths went for the cash register and cigarette cabinets, gathering together cash and property worth $7000 to $10,000.
But this raid would also mark Ale’s undoing.
Another worker had seen what was happening on closed-circuit television and activated a fog canon.
Ale and his associates then drove off in the Mazda but were followed — the court documents do not say by who — to a house in Māngere.
Police arrived and found Ale and his associates with property taken from the superette.
Having been arrested and charged, Ale was still on electronically monitored bail and was wearing an ankle bracelet when he committed the Pascoes raid in Napier on July 5, 2023.
In addition to the two stolen cars used in the robbery and to transport the youths from Hamilton, they also broke into a Ford ute on the same day as the robbery and took a .22 rifle and ammunition that was lying on the rear seats.
To cover all this offending over two years, Ale faced a raft of charges including burglary, aggravated burglary, aggravated robbery, unlawfully getting into a motor vehicle, unlawfully taking a motor vehicle, and possession of a firearm.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years and eight months’ jail.
In sentencing Ale, Judge Matenga said it was hard to believe he had convictions for such serious offending at the age of 19.
The judge noted when Ale was a child, his father was deported home to Tonga, where he died.
Ale grew up with socioeconomic deprivation and violence, and was attracted to drugs and gangs and “all that entails”.
These factors are consistent with the results of a police study in 2022 that looked at the backgrounds of young ram-raiders from an examination of thousands of charges laid.
It found they all came from unstable, impoverished households. They had all been victims or witnesses to family violence. They all had fathers who had been involved with the justice system.
In sending Ale to prison, Judge Matenga noted a pre-sentence report written by a probation officer that suggested Ale would probably offend again in the future, “and that you may have even said that to the report writer”.
The judge told him that there was another way of living.
“You have got your whole life ahead of you, Mr Ale,” Judge Matenga said.
“I just implore you to try and think, and maybe some of what you might have learnt at Sunday school may have rubbed off somewhere, that there is another, better way.”
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.
Armed police stood guard as the patched members were led out in handcuffs.