Teen faces $13,000 bill for New Brighton damage
A 19-year-old unemployed youth facing a $13,000 damage bill from his vandalism was offered all the help he needed to get his life back on track by a Christchurch District Court judge.
Shem Mikiya-Hoani Brokenshire pleaded guilty to a charge of receiving, and was sentenced on that as well as an intentional damage charge, breach of supervision, and breach of community work for a former arson charge.
Defence counsel Paul Johnson said Brokenshire had a troubled upbringing, suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, and was addicted to alcohol and cannabis.
Judge Raoul Neave said there had been an application from probation to cancel the former community work sentence, but he had decided that Brokenshire could finish the sentence while he was unemployed, and it could be converted to training.
He did cancel Brokenshire’s fines so that the money he had been paying for them could go towards reparation for the damage he had done.
Judge Neave said Brokenshire and two other people broke two large windows next to the New Brighton Public Library. Twenty-one glass balustrade panels on the pedestrian ramp were also damaged, and his share of the total reparation was $12,933.
Brokenshire’s pre-sentence report said he had been let down pretty badly by people in his past, but Judge Neave said he had to find a way to get on with his life and not go back offending again. He said Brokenshire needed to “find an extra bit of grit to try to make his life better”, and that he would be judicially monitoring his progress to help keep him on the right track.
He said the offending was mindless destruction, and Brokenshire would have been aware that Christchurch had already had an awful lot of destruction, without him damaging it further. He said it was depressing wandering around and seeing what had happened in the city.
He sentenced Brokenshire to two years’ intensive supervision with the recommended counselling and assistance from his probation officer, as well as the reparation and regular judicial monitoring.
Category: Focus
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