The suffering went back even further – at the age of 3, Arohaina had been the sole survivor of a car crash which killed her mother.
In December 2024, Trizarn Henare brought tragedy to another family when he was one of four men who bashed, kicked and stomped street-dweller Boy Taylor to death in Napier’s central business district in the early hours of the morning.
Although living mainly on the streets at the time of his death, Taylor had relatives who hailed from Tangoio, north of Napier.
Arohaina stabbed to death
After her mother died, Arohaina was brought up by another relative, Graham Mokaraka, who became her whāngai father.
In 2022, by then a mother of six, Arohaina was living in a sleepout on a Napier property where the main house was occupied by Taua and his partner.
Taua, after a day of drinking and using methamphetamine and cannabis, confronted Arohaina in the sleepout in the early hours of November 18, 2022, because of a dispute in which he had asked her to move out.
Arohaina had shoved Taua’s partner during the disagreement earlier.
“How dare you put your hands on my missus,” Taua said to Henare as he swung a knife into her chest.
He stabbed her even as she begged him to stop.
Arohaina Henare’s photo from her funeral service memorial.
After Arohaina dropped to the floor, bleeding and unconscious, neither Taua nor his partner dialled 111. Emergency services were called by friends of Henare, who came calling about 4.20am.
She died at the scene.
Bashed in the dock
In September 2023, members of the Henare whānau came to the Napier courthouse to attend a procedural hearing in Moses Taua’s murder case.
Mokaraka had not planned to be there. He went along to hand over some car keys to other family members gathered in the courtroom’s public gallery.
The family had been led to believe Taua would not be there in person, but would appear on an audio-visual link from prison.
Instead, he stood in the dock immediately in front of the gallery where family members were seated.
The half-hour hearing was nearly over and the lawyers and the judge were discussing Taua’s background.
When Mokaraka heard Taua described as partly a “victim of circumstances” in terms of his own upbringing, he felt an overwhelming rage, the court was told later.
He used the handle of a glass door in the barrier as a foothold and then scaled over the top, jumping down into the courtroom and moving towards the dock.
A Corrections officer tried to stop him, in the process ripping Mokaraka’s shirt from him, but the officer fell in a twisting motion, leaving him with a broken kneecap and other injuries.
Police arrive to restore order at the Napier courthouse after Moses Taua was attacked in the dock in 2023. Photo / Ric Stevens
Shirtless, Mokaraka began raining blows on to Taua.
Trizarn Henare and his twin brother, Cylus, followed Mokaraka over the barrier, as did a fourth family member who has since died.
They joined in attacking Taua as he tried to cower under a seat in the dock.
The three surviving attackers all later pleaded guilty to assault with intent to injure.
Mokaraka escaped a jail sentence after Judge Richard Earwaker said prison “would only extend the trauma inflicted on your family”. He sentenced Mokaraka to 12 months of home detention.
The twins, who were only 18 years old when they assaulted Taua and had no criminal record, were given 12 months of supervision and 150 hours of community work.
Night on the town
Trizarn Henare had completed his supervision sentence when he went out on the town with three others on the night of December 17 to 18, 2024.
After drinking at a bar, the four got into a dispute with a man who was wearing a blue cap – which they took to be an indicator that he was associated with a particular gang.
They subjected him to a prolonged assault, punching, kicking and stomping on him.
That man was injured but survived.
Police at the scene of Boy Taylor’s death in Emerson St, Napier. Photo / Doug Laing
Two hours later, the four came across Boy Taylor, whom they subjected to similar treatment in an attack lasting more than two minutes, which was captured on nearby security cameras.
Taylor did not survive. He died where he was beaten to the ground near an alcove where he had earlier been sheltering in Emerson St in the Napier CBD.
Four go on trial for Boy Taylor’s death
Trizarn Henare, now 20, and the other three men – Takarangi Kumar, 19, Rua Hune, 34, and Tuarima Alexander, 22 – were all charged with murdering Taylor.
They all pleaded not guilty to murder but admitted manslaughter.
After a two-week trial, a jury found the murder charge proved against Henare and Kumar, but not the other two.
The trial took place in the same courtroom where Trizarn Henare and his relatives had come over the barrier. He did not, however, occupy the same dock – the room has been remodelled in the meantime.
The murder trial jury did not know about what had happened in that room before.
On application from Henare’s defence counsel, the High Court had earlier issued take-down orders to NZME and other media organisations, requiring them to delete stories about the courtroom melee from the internet.
This was done to preserve Henare’s fair trial rights, in case any jurors went checking for his name.
Alternative views presented
Four men charged over the death of Boy Taylor behind a glass barrier in the High Court at Napier. They are from left Trizarn Henare, Rua Hune, Tuarima Alexander, and Takarangi Kumar. Photo / Ric Stevens
During the trial, the Crown and defence counsel presented alternative pictures of Boy Taylor and the fracas that killed him.
Crown prosecutor Fiona Cleary portrayed the street dweller as being alone and vulnerable on the streets of Napier in the early hours of the morning.
She said the four accused set upon him in “a sustained, repeated and escalating attack”.
However, defence counsel Eric Forster, appearing for Henare, said that Taylor became “armed and dangerous” at the point he took two bottles from the trolley in which he kept his belongings.
Boy Taylor was living mainly on the street at the time he was killed. Photo / Supplied
He smashed them, and threw one before brandishing the other as a weapon.
Two of the four later charged were cut by glass – Hune on his forehead and Henare above his left eye and a gash on his leg.
Police later tracked the trail of blood spots that the men’s injuries left on the street. It went for about 500m.
The four men will be sentenced over Taylor’s death in July.
Henare and Kumar are facing the prospect of life in prison with no parole for at least 10 years – the mandatory sentence for murder unless there are factors in his case which would make a life sentence “manifestly unjust”.
If that is the sentence handed down, it will be equivalent to the one currently being served by Moses Taua for the murder of Arohaina Henare.
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.