The Lost Boys of Riccarton
The murder trial of Taniela Kotoitoga Daven Tiako Waitokia showed us the Neverland lives of the Lost Boys of Riccarton.
If you are wondering what happened to your GPS or some other piece of electronic gear, there’s a chance it was them.
The week-long trial at the High Court in Christchurch presented the impression that the Lost Boys may have been stoned on synthetic drugs for months at a time.
The lifestyle was described by a succession of Crown witnesses, from their own experience of it.
They were open about the constant haze of drugs, and the thieving that paid for them.
They were honest, too, about the effects of the lifestyle. Remembering things exactly was an issue.
Years after the 2013 banning of synthetic cannabis – the drug that seemed to add a new layer of psychosis to drugged-out behaviour – it’s still out there in a big way.
Riccarton’s young people didn’t seem to be having any trouble buying it for $10 a gram from neighbourhood dealers, or $250 an ounce if they were flush.
Where the dealers were getting it, the jury wasn’t told.
Witnesses told of lives that consisted of getting together socially, smoking some bongs of synthetic cannabis, going to sleep for a few hours, waking and smoking more, sleeping again, and then getting more drugs – often by stealing and selling stolen goods.
Some of the witnesses were brought to court from prison, and the pastimes of the boys who lived in the Riccarton area – many of them in the mid-teens – did not include jobs or school. Drugs were their lives.
But the Crown was clear that some of the money that financed all these drug habits came from 87-year-old Harold Richardson, whose death on August 1, 2015, was the subject of the murder trial.
The man was a hoarder and a grumpy old man, the trial was told. He had high blood pressure, but no sign of much damage from the alcoholism that had overtaken him. The boys said he was often drunk.
He would pay the boys for property they brought to him, and he didn’t much care where it came from.
A lot of it was stolen. He also paid them for doing odd jobs for him.
He would continually accuse the boys from stealing from him, too. The trial heard that he took that as far as shouting at one of them across the street.
On the morning of the day he died, there had been an incident where one of the boys tried to sell him a bottle of Jagermeister, a strong German liqueur. Richardson seemed convinced that the boy had stolen it from him in the first place. The boy managed to grab the bottle of liqueur back, but got his fingers jammed in Harry Richardson’s front door in the process.
That kicked off a nasty atmosphere that day, ending with 16-year-old Taniela Waitokia deciding that evening that he was going to go around to Harry’s and get from him some money he said he was owed.
There was talk of getting, killing, or tying up Harry, and looking for a supposed household safe, according to various testimony.
The teenager’s story was that when he went to talk to Richardson, he accused the boy of thieving and grabbed his arm, and the teenager grabbed the nearest thing and bashed the old man with it. Thirteen more blows with a brandy bottle followed, apparently.
The jury was repeatedly told that it had to set aside its shock about the crime and the lifestyle and consider the legal arguments dispassionately.
And that showed up the competing sympathies – a teenager in the dock on trial for his life, and photographs on screen showing the fantastic brutality of the crime.
Category: Focus
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