Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead.<\/p>\n
His cause of death was determined as blunt force trauma to the abdomen, but he was found to have other injuries, including signs of historic injuries consistent with non-accidental assault.<\/p>\n
Now Timu, who was his legal guardian and great aunt, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter, accepting her role in his death.<\/p>\n
She failed, without lawful excuse, to provide the child in her care with necessities and take reasonable steps to protect him from injury.<\/p>\n
According to an agreed summary of facts, on the day Rickah\u2019Shae died, Timu had slapped him in the mouth as a \u201cpunishment for lying\u201d.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s alleged that, later that day, he suffered a serious assault by another person.<\/p>\n
Timu failed to intervene.<\/p>\n
When she was in her car with him later, and it was apparent he needed medical care, she still failed to seek it, pulling over to make phone calls.<\/p>\n
None of them were to emergency services.<\/p>\n
The 62-year-old also has admitted a series of charges, some of them representative, related to ill-treatment and ongoing violence towards Rickah\u2019Shae.<\/p>\n
She has accepted slapping the 8-year-old or \u201cbooting his bum\u201d, hitting him with a pole or stick as discipline, whipping him with a cord, and sometimes filming the assaults to embarrass him.<\/p>\n
In the three years she had legal custody of him, he was regularly observed with black eyes.<\/p>\n
She would shave off his hair as a punishment, keep him home from school for \u201cweeks at a time\u201d without justification, and send him to school without food.<\/p>\n
Then she would tell the school not to provide him with the free school lunches.<\/p>\n
As Timu entered guilty pleas, a large number of family members and supporters of Rickah\u2019Shae were in attendance.<\/p>\n
Rickah\u2019Shae\u2019s mother was seen crying as the various charges were put to Timu, and she admitted her guilt.<\/p>\n
Supporters of Timu shook their heads and, at some points, called out during the hearing.<\/p>\n
Nearly a decade of violence towards children<\/p>\n
Timu also pleaded guilty to violence charges related to other children, some of whom were in her fulltime care, with the offending dating back to 2013.<\/p>\n
Timu pleaded guilty to 12 charges, including the manslaughter charge, and the violence and ill-treatment charges related to Rickah\u2019Shae. <\/p>\n
They include charges of assault, assault with a weapon, and ill-treatment of children.<\/p>\n
The summaries of facts detail assaults against several children, including punches to the arms and stomach, and hits to the face, that were hard enough to leave bruises.<\/p>\n
She hit one child with a belt and a wooden spoon.<\/p>\n
On one occasion, she punched a young teen in her care in the mouth, causing the teen\u2019s lip to bleed. The punch forced the teen\u2019s head back, and it hit a door.<\/p>\n
The summary said when she hit one of the boys in her care, it was so hard that it hurt her own shoulder.<\/p>\n
Timu accepted charges of ill-treatment, which included shaving the children\u2019s hair to embarrass them, and withholding food.<\/p>\n
The Crown has asked for charges held by the District Court to be transferred to the High Court, so that all matters can be sentenced together.<\/p>\n
A preliminary date in May has been set down for sentencing in the High Court at Hamilton.<\/p>\n
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead. His cause of death was determined as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3368,165640,15035,111,43,139,69,85453,3367,165639,165638,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-301895","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-guilty","9":"tag-keefehaerewas","10":"tag-manslaughter","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-pauline","16":"tag-pleads","17":"tag-rickahshae","18":"tag-timu","19":"tag-to"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301895","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=301895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}