{"id":289697,"date":"2026-02-18T09:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T09:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/289697\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T09:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T09:14:08","slug":"huntly-man-neahemea-dey-given-home-detention-heads-to-house-to-drink-beers-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/289697\/","title":{"rendered":"Huntly man Neahemea Dey given home detention heads to house to drink beers instead"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was no chance he\u2019d be getting any evening refreshments this time though, as Judge <\/a>Gordon Matenga gave him jail time. <\/p>\n

\u2018You drank beers and lost track of time\u2019<\/p>\n

Dey was sentenced to 10 months\u2019 home detention in the Huntly District Court in August on charges of injuring with intent to injure and unlawful taking of a motor vehicle.<\/p>\n

He was instructed by Judge Denise Clark to head straight home and wait for his electronic monitoring equipment to be fitted.<\/p>\n

However, when the Corrections officer arrived, firstly at 5pm and then 8pm, Dey was nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

Judge Matenga said Dey\u2019s brother called him, and Dey \u201ccheekily\u201d told him to tell the officer to wait 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you never showed up,\u201d Judge Matenga said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou stopped at wh\u0101nau property and had a few beers and then lost track of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Police instead turned up at his home just after 10pm that evening to arrest him, but Dey pulled his arm away from the officer, shouting \u201cno\u201d, before running out of the rear of the property, through a gap in the fence.<\/p>\n

It was then that he ran through four properties, each of which had a fence.<\/p>\n

Police caught up with him, and Dey lay on the ground with his arms and hands underneath his body, refusing to release them. <\/p>\n

He told the officer he didn\u2019t want to go back to prison, and would have got away if he hadn\u2019t hurt his leg, jumping over the fence.<\/p>\n

\u2018Extremely idiotic\u2019<\/p>\n

Dey\u2019s counsel told the judge his client\u2019s offending was \u201cextremely idiotic\u201d, adding that he knew he would be going to jail.<\/p>\n

He asked that he issue a sentence of 23 months\u2019 jail.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not surprised that you were arrested and you have been in custody ever since,\u201d Judge Matenga told Dey as he stood in the dock this afternoon for sentencing.<\/p>\n

Looking at his criminal history, the judge noted he had 14 convictions for failing to comply with court bail and nine for breaches of various community-based sentences, including community work, supervision, and intensive supervision.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that leaves the only other option to a term of imprisonment, and again, unsurprisingly, the recommendation is imprisonment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judge Matenga took a starting point of 20 months\u2019 jail for the earlier offending and added another four months for his latest charges of resisting police and escaping police custody.<\/p>\n

He cancelled his active sentences of home detention, community work, judicial monitoring, and emotional harm reparation because now that he was in jail, he had no means to pay it.<\/p>\n

Dey was sentenced to 24 months\u2019 jail.<\/p>\n

Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for 11 years and has been a journalist for 22.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was no chance he\u2019d be getting any evening refreshments this time though, as Judge Gordon Matenga gave…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84023,20556,160741,36979,19724,7799,1345,10053,6655,27705,5158,160740,111,43,139,69,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-289697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-beers","9":"tag-detention","10":"tag-dey","11":"tag-drink","12":"tag-given","13":"tag-heads","14":"tag-home","15":"tag-house","16":"tag-huntly","17":"tag-instead","18":"tag-man","19":"tag-neahemea","20":"tag-new-zealand","21":"tag-news","22":"tag-newzealand","23":"tag-nz","24":"tag-to"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}